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Well, Ubuntu 8.04 has been released, and I’ve just upgraded to it! There was one “gotcha” during the installation, which hopefully will help people if I blog about it:

Once I’d completed the upgrade (which I did via the usual update manager), the machine rebooted and came up with the login screen. I logged in normally, but then just came up with a blank screen and stayed there. When I say “blank screen” I mean a screen with the default Ubuntu colour as the background, and the mouse pointer was working, but nothing on the screen. I couldn’t even use Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get to a terminal login. (Having said that, I can’t now so it might be something to do with my setup).

Anyway, it turns out this is a fairly easy problem to fix!

• Reboot the machine
• When you get to the login prompt, select Options -> Select Session
• Select the “Gnome Failsafe” session
• Login as normal
• Once you’re in, open up a terminal window and type in: sudo rm /tmp/.X0-lock

That seemed to fix the problems for me, but I will update if I encounter anything else.

Anyway, my first thoughts are that I like 8.04, although I’m not sure about the decision to include a beta version of Firefox as standard. Most of my extensions don’t work with Firefox 3 yet, so that means I’m stuck without a few extensions I like for the time being. This is my first experience with FF3 as well and it does seem quicker, but I will reserve final judgement until it actually gets a full release in a couple of months.

… strangely enough, not the Operating System.

I’m talking about Ubuntu Coke! I’m not sure why they decided on the name ‘Ubuntu’, given that there’s already a pretty well-known operating system out there with the same name and a moment’s Googling would have easily found it, but still.

It seems like Ubuntu Coke is fairly traded, so I’m not quibbling!

Thanks to Alex for the coke!

Well, I’ve finally managed to get desktop effects (Compiz) working on Ubuntu Gutsy! I’ve been having problems for a while – I’m not sure why, could be a number of things… each time I tried to enable the desktop effects, it just came up with a message about not being able to enable them! Enabling the proprietary ATI drivers made no difference (I have an ATI Radeon x300). Anyway, I managed to get it working by following the manual installation instructions on this page.

Yay! Now my desktop has cool effects, a bit like Mac OS X or Windows Vista. I know it’s just eye candy, but… eye candy is good :-) As Apple say, “the interface is the application”.

Last week, Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” was released. I started the upgrade procedure yesterday.

Now, the upgrade procedure is one of the things I have a serious gripe with about Ubuntu. You can’t just start it upgrading and then leave it for the duration. You actually have to be there the entire time, in case some stupid confirmation dialog comes up asking you if you want to (for example) overwrite a custom configuration file (If you have a customised apache2 configuration file, for example I’ve added mod_dav_svn to mine). If a confirmation dialog box pops up, it actually halts the entire installation process while it waits for you to select an option.

What Ubuntu really needs is a checkbox that says “Do not interrupt me during this upgrade” (or something like that). The default options should be enough. For example, in the case of a customised configuration file, it could save the updated file to config_file.new and leave you a message at the end of the installation telling you to check it.

If they absolutely *must* have confirmation dialogs, could they make it “non-blocking”, i.e. the installation will continue? Or at least, put all the steps which require confirmation in one place, i.e. at the beginning / end? Leaving Ubuntu to upgrade overnight or during the day, only to find out that it requires confirmation, is incredibly annoying and I think deserves special attention.

Aaaanyway. Apart from that, Ubuntu 7.10 seems to be pretty good so far. They’ve given it another visual makeover, and the new features list looks pretty decent (for example, auto-configuration of printers).

So if you’re a Ubuntu user, there’s no reason not to upgrade! The only thing to mention is, your system will probably run at 100% CPU usage for a while after upgrading. This is due to a service called tracker, which is a file indexer. It initially has to run through all of your files, which takes up the time. Once the files have all been scanned, however, I think it doesn’t use much CPU. Just in case you’re wondering why your CPU is being hammered after upgrading!