The two most serious problems were atrocious Intel video performance, and ongoing sound issues. Thankfully, the Intel issues have been addressed. Specifically, a really nice Troubleshooting Intel Performance document by Bryce Harrington has appeared. It lays out what is happening (in short: major driver refactoring), why it is affecting performance on some hardware, and specifically what to check and how to work around speed issues.

I ended up going back to the xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.4 package which fixes my main issue – really slow workspace switches. Looks like kernel and X.org fixes have already made it to Karmic Koala, but I’m happy to use the older driver until Karmic is released.

As for tor, Jaunty packages are now available so to install tor, just add

deb     http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor jaunty main
deb-src http://mirror.noreply.org/pub/tor jaunty main

to your

/etc/apt/sources.list

and apt-get install tor.

Finally – there’s a better way to reload the sound modules:

alsa force-reload