What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

Recording my Ubuntu upgrade experience has become something of a tradition, so here goes.

• Machine 1 (laptop, LG T1 Express Duo). Largely trouble-free. On-board soundcard not seen on reboot. Fixed (temporarily, lost on reboot) using “sudo alsa force-reload”.
• Machine 2 (various generic hardware, cobbled together over many years). Upgrade smooth until final restart, when machine froze. Rebooted to a blank screen. Fixed by swapping out ATI video card for old NVidia FX5200. Discovered that rsyslog is running riot due to a hot CPU and is trying to fill up /var/log.
• Machine 3 (Dell Optiplex GX550). Install froze at “stopping winbind server”. Rebooted with rescue CD, mounted and chroot-ed into Linux partition, tried “dpkg –force-all –configure -a”, but to no avail. Reinstalled in same partition, all is working well.

All in all, not very impressed. Canonical, could do better.

Ubuntu/jaunty rocks, on the whole. However, to prove that newer does not always equal better, they threw in a couple of shockers. The first is the upgrade from the excellent Amarok 1.4 to the completely-broken 2.0. Head here to repair the damage.

Kile is by far my favourite LaTeX editor and suffered, though not as badly, in the upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1. Reports of various problems litter the web; in my case I see broken toolbar buttons that do nothing when clicked. This fix is much simpler. Just “sudo apt-get remove kile”, scroll to the bottom of the intrepid package page, choose your architecture, download the deb file and “sudo dpkg -i kile_2.0.1-1ubuntu1_i386.deb”. I had no dependency problems and it works just fine.

Finally – open up Synaptic, find kile and from the Package menu item select “lock package”, to prevent future upgrades.

Update: a few days after writing this, an apt-get dist-upgrade upgraded my Kile to 2.1 (despite the “lock package”). However, the broken buttons issue is now fixed for me. Go figure…

Nothing exciting – just a couple of notes on the Ubuntu upgrade experience from 7.10 to 8.04.
Read the rest…

Just a quick and boring hardware post for those Linux users stuck with ATI video cards. Release 8.42.3 of the proprietary fglrx driver now supports AIGLX and the composite extension (which means compiz-fusion and cool desktop effects without the need for Xgl).

My own experience on Ubuntu 7.10:

• Installation relatively painless using any of these guides: one, two, three
• Performance reasonable except that (1) cube rotation a little choppy, (2) 3D GL apps flicker terribly (fix: turn off compiz)
• Much less CPU/RAM usage than when running Xgl

If you´re happy with the Xgl solution, stick with it until things improve. Some progress, at least.