Gutsy gibbon

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:56 pm

On another note, for some reason Nautilus is ridiculously more responsive than it was with Feisty. The upgrade to Feisty went more smoothly, but Nautilus was dog slow, taking several seconds to open. Now it's open in a couple of seconds or less. If I'd have known a broken upgrade gave you more responsiveness, I'd have broken my Feisty upgrade, too.

As for the applications list thing I mentioned earlier was about my "Applications -> Other" menu being filled with a ton of little apps that don't seem like they should be there (Cookies, Interrupt, DMA-Channels). Not sure why that happened, though I imagine I can fix that with menu editor.

MagnumIP · Post by **MagnumIP** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:17 pm

I am just getting around to playing with my fresh install of 7.10 on my Vaio. I have a problem with the audio coming out of both the headphone jack and the laptop speakers. Haven't had time to see if anything else is not working but I have time this weekend to really get into it

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 1:13 am

I have only had a single successful ubuntu upgrade, and it was from Edgy to Feisty. I'm definitely trying this on a test machine before I upgrade my lappy, which I'd be

without.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:21 am

Yeah, my laptop is the computer I truly want to keep rock solid stable. Come to think of it, I should be running something like Slackware or stable Debian on it then, shouldn't I? Oh well, it came with Ubuntu, so I'll leave it be, and once I buy another hard drive so I can really back this thing up, I'll go ahead and give it a shot.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 11:13 am

In a perfect world, my lappy would be rock solid stable, but considering reality...

I don't expect rock solid stability, but I don't want an upgrade to completely fuxor my system, either. It is a considerable amount of work for me to get kubuntu to a state where I like it - far more work than it is for me to, say, install Arch, really.

Anyhow, the updater already bombed out on me, claiming I don't have enough free space on / - untrue. I'm about to reboot and try again, though.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 1:49 pm

After all my complaining, the whole computer is much more responsive with Gutsy for some reason, and I haven't found many things wrong since I removed evms, which gave me my home partition back, and after I reinstalled dbus, though I'm not sure whether that was what helped. I also had to start a new profile for Firefox, but easily retrieved my bookmarks, and Firefox is starting faster, too.

The upgrade to Feisty was so smooth, it had a hard act to follow. Generally my experiences upgrading any desktop Linux system can drive me nuts, but I always count on the separate home partition to save me some grief if I have to start from scratch. But even this makes me wonder about some little xml file in the .gnome2 directory that could be causing problems. I know upgrading any system is a hassle, but I do wish I could trust my home partition more, or at least know how to find any problems with some preference file and clean that up, particularly when things seem far less responsive than they should, like Nautilus was when I was using Feisty.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 4:23 pm

Well, not surprisingly, adept bombed out, leaving dpkg in a fucked up state. I rebooted to a nice bash prompt. I got around that by removing the file it kept crapping out on and doing another "dpkg --configure -a" after which I had to do an "apt-get clean" and an "apt-get -f upgrade" to get anything happening again. It remains to be seen whether I end up with a functioning system after all this, and there is really no way in hell s noephyte would be able to do this. If ubuntu really cant get this shit working dependably They need to switch their upgrade model to something more reasonable like every 12 or 18 months and just do rolling updates in between. "I don't want my system to eat hot death" is a shitty reason to have to avoid an upgrade. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Arch - who knows?

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 4:31 pm

Snarkout, I feel the same way. A new user would be completely screwed, and even though Gentoo takes a ton of time to compile, I never had the system nearly fail to boot, lose my home directory, or any such business as I had this upgrade. Some of the fixes were easy enough for me when I found them in the forum, but my sister would have been pissed. I'm glad I kept her with Dapper.

I think they should back off to a yearly release as well if it would help them avoid these issues, and there appear to be quite a few of them judging by the forum.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 5:28 pm

Honestly, it's these 6 month upgrades that prompted me to switch to Gentoo. Sure, I could just skip every other Ubuntu release, but that's not much fun. Who likes being stuck with frozen code for 12 months? From my experience, it's much easier (and more fun) to compile minor, incremental updates every few weeks to get the latest and greatest apps, without needing to do re-installs, or painful upgrades every 6 or 12 months.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 5:57 pm

Well, I got it back to a kde screen, and like I mentioned earlier, their xorg.conf needed some work since I had a screen that was outside the confines of my monitor. Meaning, if I moused to any edge of the screen, the entire screen would scroll that direction. Does anyone know whst the "virtual" line in the monitors section of xorg.conf is even supposed to do (I didn't bother looking but it always causes issues for me)? Anyhow, other than the ugly bit there, it seems to be working well now. Virtualbox still works, which is key for me - I need windows on my lappy, as I've mentioned before, but I don't want to run it all the time.

Now it wants to download another 250 megs of updates - ::scared::

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:21 pm

Wally Balljacker wrote:Honestly, it's these 6 month upgrades that prompted me to switch to Gentoo. Sure, I could just skip every other Ubuntu release, but that's not much fun. Who likes being stuck with frozen code for 12 months? From my experience, it's much easier (and more fun) to compile minor, incremental updates every few weeks to get the latest and greatest apps, without needing to do re-installs, or painful upgrades every 6 or 12 months.

I can't believe all the issues that people are having with Ubuntu Upgrade. When 3 out of 4 of the TLLTS crowd have issues (Allan has not blogged one way or another), and all of you in the forums who know their stuff, this is cause for concern. I will admit that I had stayed on Ubuntu LTS until just a week ago because of all the issues I had hear with the last two releases, I was scared to upgrade.

I know I mentioned it in another post, but I have just discovered Foresight, and I have to say it is amazing from an upgrade stand point. Rolling release schedule, they create CD and DVD isos when new major versions of Gnome come out. Conary does some increadible things. Only upgrades the code in packages that has changed, not the whole package. Allows you to do an undo of an upgrade. After installing and upgrading I fell into a little bug in the Gnome 2.20.1 release which Foresight immediately upgraded to. It was really a Gnome issue from the sounds of it, but to get a working desktop again, I just issued the command "sudo conary rollback 1" which brought me back to a stable desktop again. I love that, if I have a bad upgrade experience, I just undo it, and wait for the bugs to be fixed. I don't have to dig around in config files and use other criptic commands. That is so cool. Anyway, just wanted to let you know there was another distro trying to get this whole upgrade thing right.

Ken, the main developer will be on TLLTS in a few weeks, I'm looking forward to the interview.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:26 pm

greggh wrote:I did a 7.10 fresh install today. It has the same major problem that Feisty had. I can not use the nvidia driver required for 3d acceleration and compiz. When I enable it in Restricted drivers and reboot my screen is totally blurry and when I check the screen resolution setting it tells me that the refresh rate is only 50 Hz and there are no other refresh rates in the dropdown box. Using the default open driver I get a default of 60 Hz and can also choose 75 HZ. So right now I'm running Gutsy but with the deault open video driver and no 3d or compiz. My video card is a nvidia FX 5200. If any one knows how to fix this, please let me know.

Did you fix this? I have the same card. I often have to manually edit the xorg.conf file after installing Ubuntu, it almost always fails to set up my xorg correctly.

Make sure you have the specific Horizontal and Vertical scan rates for your monitor, then edit your "screen" section, with the correct rates. This is normally the section that Ubuntu messed up.

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:56 pm

mowestusa wrote:
greggh wrote:I did a 7.10 fresh install today. It has the same major problem that Feisty had. I can not use the nvidia driver required for 3d acceleration and compiz. When I enable it in Restricted drivers and reboot my screen is totally blurry and when I check the screen resolution setting it tells me that the refresh rate is only 50 Hz and there are no other refresh rates in the dropdown box. Using the default open driver I get a default of 60 Hz and can also choose 75 HZ. So right now I'm running Gutsy but with the deault open video driver and no 3d or compiz. My video card is a nvidia FX 5200. If any one knows how to fix this, please let me know.
Did you fix this? I have the same card. I often have to manually edit the xorg.conf file after installing Ubuntu, it almost always fails to set up my xorg correctly.

Make sure you have the specific Horizontal and Vertical scan rates for your monitor, then edit your "screen" section, with the correct rates. This is normally the section that Ubuntu messed up.

Nope. Not fixed yet. I'm just running it without the proprietary nvidia driver, without desktop effects enabled. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but even though I've been running Linux (Ubuntu) for over a year now I'm still not comfortable dropping down to the CLI or manually editing conf files. I guess that's one of the dangers of starting with a distro like Ubuntu, you can stay locked in a pretty GUI, and never really learn how to admin your system. That's one of the reasons I'm itching to switch to Debian testing.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 10:16 pm

Also, apparently after getting the Dell Ubuntu laptop, and getting the Intel graphics driver, I still won't be able to get Compiz without problems on my 1420n:

Compiz Fusion 965 Incompatibility.

I know EXA wasn't ready, but one of the reasons I was looking forward to Gutsy was that I hoped to get Compiz working on open drivers without giving up something, like video playback. Now it just looks like I'll have to work my way through a couple of upgrades and deal with the issues until I can stick with Hardy for the long term. I might give another distro a try. Honestly, I'm caring less and less about bleeding edge. I'd really like to be able to have a fairly nice upgrade once a year or so. Or the rolling updates of Gentoo, which just brought the occasional minor problem. Either that or I forget about this a few months from now, since I was pretty much able to get things running again in a day or so.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 10:20 pm

Well after those few burps and farts, things are back up and running. My scroll wheel stopped working for some reason - that's about it, so far.

After all that, I'm trying to figure out what the point of upgrading was - a new kernel and updated packages? The only thing that seems at all different is dolphin, really. I can sum up dolphin in 4 words: "I don't like it." Maybe this will change. I'm really trying to have an open mind, but to me, even as a kde freak, it seems cluttered and lacks flow. It also looks bad - I mean, early linux "OMFG - that linux really looks crappy" bad. Again, maybe I'll warm up to it, but honesly, konqueror was pretty much perfect IMO - at least designwise.

On a total tangent, I should see if I can't resurrect my frugalware disk - I really liked that distro a lot.