Minds Eye

A couple of weekends ago Hardy Heron was released and who in their right mind would not upgrade.

I decided to do the upgrade after downloading the CD install rather than using the built in package management "upgrade" option. I downloaded the 64bit version of the standard install CD, only to find after burning and re-inserting the CD that "upgrade" was not an option. I could add the CD as a new repository, but that sis not look right.

A quick search through the Ubuntu forums alerted me to the fact that to perform an upgrade like this (which you could do previously using this CD format/title/style) you now need to download the "alternative" CD. 28 mins later I have the alternative CD and was burning it back out to try out.

Perfect - insert the CD and you are prompted to upgrade. A few tests and checks later I am ready to go with about 440Mb of additional downloads. I suppose that is what you get for having a large number of non-default packages installed, including Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, development libraries, video and audio encoding libraries, blah blah blah.... Following the download I rebooted and was ready for anything. Here is what I have found do far.

Almost everything has worked out of the box on first reboot without any tweaks.

I was suprised to see FireFox 3 beta 5 was the default browser install. A beta version of something so intergral to the day to day operations in this day and age (another whole blog entry on that topic), but then again this is the long term support edition and getting it in now will make life easier later on for all sorts of reasons. Flash worked out of hte box using the "nspluginwrapper" libraries and setup, although the couple of JAVA applets which I require on certain sites failed. Firing up the 32bit version which I had installed revealed zero network connectivity. Huh!!!!

Quick Ubuntu forums search revealed (as the last point) in the main sticky how to post relating to 32bit FF on 64bit OS installs that you will need to disbale "ipv6" support globally in the OS by removing a modprobe alias entry and blacklisting the ipv6 module from loading. Reboot and FF 2.x fire sup with no worries. Still no JAVA but that was an easy fix with a default install and soft link of the normal JAVA 32 bit runtime environment.

Web browsing aside I noticed the "advanced 3D effects" were all enabled, but some of the default key bindings I used for certain functions had been lost. For a bleeding edge implementation of compiz-fusion (which is absolutely necessary once you are used to the productivity increases which are found) I was not too deterred and just went straight into the "advanced desktop effects settings" and fixed it all up.

All multimedia worked out of the box and of course all other user defined preferences were retained and working.

VMware workstation required a quick "any-any" update and reinstall and then ran like it never knew the difference.

There are some other file browsing features I have noticed which are just niceties added to the interface and usability.

• During a file copy (larger ones make it more obvious) you are presented with a nice timed dialogue for files remaining and also a notification bar icon to let you know that there is a copy in progress.
• There is a notification bar icon which lets you know that there is a package management application running, even when you run an "apt-get" from the command line.
• It now only requires a single click in a shortcut or bookmark from the file browser to open that destination in the browser pane, which is more in line with the file open and file save dialogues which are used from within applications.

I have noticed a small glitch when resuming from suspend (which just works) where  login dialogue is not displayed. The whole screen is a shade of the background. You can see the cursor but nothing else and just typing in your password will unlock the laptop?

The whole process is pretty easy (normal users may get a little stuck with the 32bit browser plugin thingy) but apart from that the whole thing "just worked" and I think that Joe Bloggs desktop user would have no problems upgrading and be chuffed by the enhancements.