TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Well, the time is here: the next Long-Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu is out. I don't know why this excites me, particularly considering how reluctant a fan I am of this distribution. Maybe I'm just a boring person. But I digress.

This rant is going to be special in a couple of ways. First, it's going to be longer. This release is an important milestone and I think it deserves a verbose description.

Second, I'm going to describe both my experiences upgrading Rig 4 and doing a clean install on Rig 2. These have usually resulted in very different experiences, and I expect this to be no different.

Install (Upgrade):

I'm always leery about the idea of upgrading a Linux distribution. I've installed quite a few in my time, and without fail, something *always* goes wrong with an upgrade. It may or may not be a huge thing, but there's always something.

I upgraded my existing Gutsy (7.10) install using this method. It downloaded a small application that just let me know what was going on. Roughly 1,100 packages had to be downloaded and installed.

On my work network connection this took me roughly an hour and a half, but given the choice of that or wait a couple of days for the FTP traffic to die down for an ISO, I chose this route.

I was asked at various points whether or not I wanted to remove obselete packages. I chose yes. Everything installed and I was asked to reboot.

I received an error on reboot that nautilus and something called "gears" had crashed, and was asked if I'd like to submit a bug report. Both reports indicated something odd with the Nvidia driver.

I found several similar bugs on the Launchpad website, some of which said there was a fix available so I decided not to submit and instead to enable all the repositories and get as many updates as I could find.

Innotek Virtualbox didn't survive the upgrade. I got an error saying the vboxdrv kernel module was no longer installed. This didn't surprise me since Hardy uses a newer version of the Linux kernel. However, the upgrade should have flagged this package as either obselete or in need of an update.

I uninstalled it and waited until I'd gotten all my other updates installed before reinstalling from Add/Remove. The reinstall gave me the same error, so I opened up Synaptic and tried to find the module it wanted. That didn't help either.

I decided to screw the OSE version on the repositories and download the commercial version from Innotek. There was no official DEB for Hardy yet, so I downloaded the DEB for Gutsy. It compiled the vboxdrv module. I added my user to the "vboxusers" group, logged out and back in, and voila. It worked.

Gweled, a GTK+ Bejeweled clone I had installed in Gutsy, showed some rather odd behavior after the upgrade. It launched just fine, and I was happy to see that there was now an option in the preferences to turn off the background music. What was odd is that the menubar across the top (File, Edit, etc) were in another language. I assume "Fichier" is French, but I could be wrong.

It wasn't all frustrations. One thing that never quite worked right in Gutsy was the mute button on the front of my laptop. I could mute and unmute just fine, but if there was a significant period of time between muting and unmuting, the original volume level I had set would disappear. I would essentially have to turn the volume back up every time I unmuted. Thankfully this seems to have been fixed in Hardy.

Another thing that's never quite worked right was suspend/hibernate. For those of you unfamiliar, laptops generally offer you several options for saving power.

You can suspend (sleep), which is the default behavior on some laptops when you close their lid. The whole computer goes into a sort of coma. Your screen shuts off, drives power down, and the computer uses significantly less power.

You can also hibernate. This one essentially saves all the contents in RAM onto the harddrive and turns the computer off. It uses no power, and when you wake it up you'll start back precisely where you left off, with all your apps running and documents open.

In Ubuntu 7.10, suspend *usually* worked fine unless I suspended for a long time. Then it would refuse to wake up. Hibernate never worked for me in the past.

So far, I've played with suspend and hibernate and both seem to work as advertised in Hardy. I'll post back should I run into the "won't wake up" bug again.

Install (Clean):

Hardy offers a new way to do a clean install. Rather than booting into the LiveCD environment and opening an install program, you choose "Install Ubuntu" and it takes you straight into a GUI installer environment.

If you just want to play with the LiveCD, you can choose to "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer." This is a nice touch, as most of the time I just want to install and not have to wait on the LiveCD to load.

The install went off mostly without a hitch. One thing I always have to do on Rig 2 is dance around the proprietary wireless card it has. I had to install ndiswrapper and manually add my MS Windows drivers to get the Broadcom card working. More on that in a minute.

I also installed the "build-essential" meta-package to get Nvidia drivers compiled. That, at least, worked as I expected.

It's worth noting that the CDROM wasn't added as a source by default so when I searched for ndiswrapper in Synaptic it couldn't find it. I was incensed that the Ubuntu team would remove such a useful package, until I looked at the actual CD contents and found it.

Ndiswrapper gave me grief. Instead of the usual manual install then reboot, Hardy kept asking me to install the "bc43xx-fwcutter" package from the CD.

I let it try, but it kept saying that the package didn't exist. I installed it manually off the disc. Still, the drivers I manually installed that have worked in every previous version of Ubuntu did not work. I was not amused.

Network manager claimed that there were no network devices present. The "Hardware Drivers" program (formerly known as "Restricted Drivers Manager") showed that I was indeed using ndiswrapper and the firmware for my card had been installed when I did it from the command-line.

It said the Broadcom driver was "In Use", but the "Enabled" checkbox was not checked. If I checked that box, it asked me to install that "fwcutter" program again, and inevitably errored out even after I had manually installed it. I gave up at this point and re-installed Ubuntu 7.10 on Rig 2.

Software Selection:

Not much has changed in the default applications for Hardy. If you've used Gutsy (7.10) or Dapper (6.06), you won't notice much. Firefox, Pidgin, OpenOffice, and GIMP where present, as well as the usual Gnome games.

Serpentine CD Creator is gone. Good riddance. Brasero is the new do-all CD application for audio, data, and disc copying.

I did notice something new with the right-click menu: Encrypt. Apparently Hardy allows you the ability to encrypt directories or files. If you choose to encrypt something, it brings up a window that deals with keys. I don't use this functionality so I didn't investigate further.

One thing that I didn't get to test was the Wubi installer, which allows MS Windows users to install a copy of Ubuntu inside their existing Windows partition (just a file on the harddrive, essentially).

All they need to do is pop in the Ubuntu CD while booted into Windows. They can then try out Ubuntu and uninstall it using Add/Remove just like any other program. It's a very cool feature, but I don't have a Windows box upon which to test it.

Conclusion:

Wow. I had no idea just how different these experiences would be when I started. One was smooth, the other quite rough. Perhaps a new codename is in order.(Get my two-headed reference yet?)

On my laptop, things went relatively smoothly. After installing the latest updates everything worked as expected. The crashes that I saw on my first reboot never showed up again. Since my laptop uses Intel wireless, I doubt I would have had any trouble with a clean install either.

Unexpectedly, the desktop was what gave me grief, and it was specifically the way the ndiswrapper package worked. Or rather, the way it didn't.

I can't universally damn the distribution for that, though. Just a warning: if you have a network card that needs 3rd-party drivers, you're likely to have trouble. Stick with 7.10, have an ethernet cable handy, or wait for 8.10 in October.

Here's hoping Intrepid Ibex has a more universally-smooth experience. I expected more from a Long-Term Support release.