Ubuntued

So I’ve been using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) for a couple of weeks now. In comparision to Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), I’m facing quite a few problems which I wasn’t able to solve or didn’t even bother to:
- Some applications are not running anymore, for some reason. Actually they’re running, but as soon as they’re loaded they automatically shut down; not error message or system crash or anything. Among other things: Azureus, some system tools (eg. System -> Administration -> Screen Graphics), and even the System -> About Ubuntu page (which is absolutely weird). A first diagnosis would lead you to uninstall and reinstall the applications in question, but the problem is definetly somewhere else (since system tools are affected). It’s probably some simple configuration-related issue (99.9%), or some very ugly bug (0.1%), caused by this release. SOLVED
- Wine is occasionaly giving me a headache particularly when it comes to changing the graphic resolution of an application running under it.
- No luck in getting Compiz Fusion to work.
- No Ubuntu 7.10 guide was setup yet on Ubuntu.com, that’s really annoying. I must refer to 7.04 everytime. I understand that the release is still fresh, and that it takes time for the community to get the docs together, I thus restrain myself to waiting, but still I feel something is missing. SOLVED – new docs available
- Flash Player 9 and Firefox = memory leak. This is a very serious error; for some flash content displayed in Firefox, the memory leaks continuously, until all your system ressources are sucked up and you have no other solution than to restart the browser, or ultimately the computer. This problem was really annoying, a big part of my effort went into debugging the flash SWF first; until I figured out this problem only occured on the comibnation Ubuntu 7.10 – Firefox. Reporting that bug on launchpad.

Still, I must admit some things seem to have improved since my migration to Gutsy:
- On Feisty, for no particular reason, the screen sometimes just flickered and went blank (my guess would be something is going wrong with X11). In that case, the only solution was to reboot. I’m not experiencing that behavior anymore in Ubuntu 7.10 fortunetly.
- Performance has increased it seems, some application are running faster such (the kernel is in for something, thank you Linus!) such as Eclipse.
- No particular improvements though on Nautilus, it still occasionaly crashes and restarts itself.

Overall, I would suggest at that time not upgrading to Gutsy, particularly if you’re the average linux user. The smart thing to do, in my situation, would be to downgrade back to Feisty, but the process will involve backing up everything and reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch, which would consume very scarce ressouces: time and effort. Since I’m feeling like a lab rat (like any other Ubuntu enthusiast), I’ll stick to Gutsy and try to do my part in making it better.

Update
Lot has changed since I updated; new updates, applications, bug fixes and problems fixed. I am now quite satisfied with Gutsy!

I completed the switch to Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”. The update process was quite simple but a bit annoying and takes some time (I wasted 2:30 hours in my case, and you’ll have to do the same . I updated from 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” which made the process run smoothly (direct update). You need to follow a completely different stream if you’re upgrading from Ubuntu 5.10 and 6.x. See Ubuntu 7.10 upgrade notes if you fall in that category of users.

Simple because you just have to point and click to get the job started. Annoying because you have to stay close while the upgrade goes on: you’ll get lots of confirmation dialog boxes all along and unfortunately there are no default behavior which will keep the upgrade going. It will update something like 1300 packages.

If you’re ready for that, here we go:

1. Just point to System -> Administration -> Update Manager
2. Click on Check to refresh the updates; you’ll see the following message just hit Upgrade:
   
3. This will get the upgrade process started. Now let the progress bar hypnotize you while you wait for a couple of hours.
   
4. Confirm the annoying dialog boxes along the way: things like Do you want to start the upgrade? and Remove obsolete packages?. It gets more serious when you’re asked about whether or not the upgrade should overwrite your apache2 configuration files; so make sure you read before you click.

– 2:00 later –

5. It’s finally over, restart your system.

You don’t have to upgrade if you’re happy with your current Ubuntu configuration, I have been reading lots of mediocre feedback about Ubuntu 7.10 breaking some applications and causing some drivers not to work correctly anymore; in my case, Azureus is not running anymore, my webcam a Hercules Webcam Deluxe stopped working (I reconfigured it and got that fixed, here’s how), and I’m guessing some other problems will be surfacing.

I’m noticing already a real improvement with performance (Linux 2.6.22 kernel might be in for something). Some new useful features in GNOME 2.20. I’ve obviously did not get a grip at all the new features yet, will do. Among other things, I just dig the new GIMP logo:

The Ubuntu team has been busy it seems. Proof, I received this email a couple of days ago:

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Release Candidate for version 7.10
of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu, and Xubuntu codenamed “Gutsy Gibbon”.
…
We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for
testing by any user.

The final release of version 7.10 is scheduled for 18 October 2007…
LTS, with security support until 2011, rather than upgrade to 7.10.

Lots of new features and fixes in 7.10 most notably (what I’m interested in):
- A 3D desktop environment (Compiz Fusion)
- Free flash support with Gnash (finally, I was really missing descent flash support on Ubuntu)
- Also GNOME can now automatically detect printers, and you get to install firefox plugins through the repository.
- Gobuntu 7.10: a new flavor of Ubuntu composed exclusively of open-source non-restricted software.
- Other updates on Kubuntu and Edubuntu.

I’m currently running 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). I think I’ll wait at least until 18th October (date of the final release) before updating to 7.10, in case some ugly bug surfaces during the test period. However, if you feel like you could lay a helping hand, feel free to update here.