Ubuntu ++

As Apache conference europ is now over, and ADS 1.5.2 has been released, it's time for an upgrade. I was an happy Ubuntu 7.0.4 user since last year, but I wanted to experiment some new flavor with Ubuntu 8.0.4.

The previous version was pretty OK, except that I had a few freeze from time to time (once a month), plus using a beamer was a PITA, as you had to reboot your laptop in order to get the screen resolution adapted, and back (thanks to Noel Bergman for the trick :)

At first, I tried the upgrade process... Not production ready, it seems ! Four failures, and it ended with a Kernel panic, with not that many option than a full install :)

Welcome to the pleasure dome ! At least, as I *knew* it will happen, I saved my /home somwhere where its safe.

So let's go for a burning session (actually, I dried 3 CD instead of one, thanks to some crappy DVD drives)

When done, the best part was that I was able to access my /etc/fstab to write down on a piece of paper the partition's names, as I have 10 of them, and didn't want to reformat all of them. Installation took 15 minutes (well, 30 minutes as I had to play it twice, due to a wrong username I typed). Pretty fast for a laptop installation. Btw, Canonical, it would be _very_ usefull if you suggest to use the previously existing /etc/fstab instead of just asking the user to type the mount points.


So far, so good. Booting is fast, the default background image (a heron) is crappy, but hopefully, it used my default one.

Suspend works like a charm, but thunderbird, xchat and gaim have been removed from my disk. I have evolution installed instead, not really what I want to use. The problem is that some repository are not installed by default (just because they want to offer a long term support, I guess). Not cool. But easy to fix (just add the repository in the update manager)

To get all the 'maccish' effects on my laptop, I had to install a new driver for my NVidia card, but I just had to click on the 'OK' button. Pretty slick !

Some default fonts are not really pleasant (like in terminal or in thunderbird). I will have to select my favorite courrier font.

Rebooting is FAST. Not that I use it often (It's linux, stupid !), but from time to time you have to.

What I miss is to be able to select my last user instead of typing my name when rebooting, like in FC8.

So far, so good. Five hours to get my laptop up and running, that's pretty cheap.

One last thing : Canonical, you have to try a little bit harder on the standard upgrade :)

Update :
Don't use the NVidia driver... I had to reinstall the full machine after having rebooted and got my graphic session totally blank : no icon, nothing, just the mouse.