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Upgrading to Jaunty Jackalope

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My Opinion of Upgrading to Jaunty Jackalope:

The upgrade process from Intrepid Ibex was my first experience upgrading Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I recalled being impressed by Intrepid Ibex when it was initially installed, which was my first real attempt at Ubuntu following a very short attempt at running Ubuntu GNU/Linux without a pointing device attached to my Myth box.

Upgrading Debian often involved just running /apt-get dist-update/ since I was constantly running the /testing/ branch, and this meant that, if performed frequently, there weren't many changes. This was a very fluid upgrade process. Upgrading to "Jaunty" was much more obvious. The update applet indicated that a new release was available, performed the necessary changes to prepare for the release (presumably changing the apt (package manager) sources and downloading the new installer. The new installer then downloaded about 1800 packages. This could have gone a little smoother since my wireless flaked out a few times, causing me to need to restart the process manually to fetch the remaining packages.

Then Jaunty performed the package updates, removals, and replacements it advertised. I noticed a few oddities--apparently zsnes, a Super Nintentendo Entertainment System emulator was being removed, as was python 2.4 (presumably for a newer version, I thought). Eventually it completed, popped-up a few dialogs (which was not very polite of it as I was trying to get real work done), and eventually demanded that I reboot.

Upon rebooting, I was happy that I could actually log in as normal. Things did seem to take a little bit longer--the Gnome Desktop interface seemed a little bit slower to appear, the NetworkManager applet was not registering the signal level, and the Ubuntu update applet was no longer present; but overall, things were ok. Eventually the NetworkManager applet functioned normally, I figured the updater might just need to be updated for Jaunty, and I thought maybe the speed was just perception.

I then noticed that alt-tab no longer used the Compiz plug-in I'd selected--checking, it was still enabled, but it turned-out that the update overwrote a bunch of my short-cut keys, remapping them to other things. It also seemed that everytime I typed something into the location bar in firefox, the CPU would peg and Compiz would become unusable. DontZap appears to be the default for Xorg now as well, to exacerbate the problem. The problem turned-out to be my second monitor--dropping to just the LCD in my MacBook 4, the graphical stability problems seemed to get better for a little while, but the actual work-around was disabling compiz (semi-officially, the way you should do this is be going to System->Preferences->Appearance from the default GNOME Desktop Environment menu, select the Visual Effects tab, and choose none. This is, unfortunately, the only way to fix the stability issues out-of-the-box, although one can fix Jaunty graphical instability by updating Nvidia drivers.

Other things that were not working out of the upgraded box, and required manual re-setting-up include
sound (which required re-adding the option line to modprobe.d/options, sndhdaintel model=mbp3),
video capture through the integrated iSight camera, and possibly most importantly, getting the synaptics touchpad working in Jaunty.

I'm still trying to build my python set-up back to a working model, and the Tracker applet incessantly pops-up an indicator its index is corrupt. Pausing indexing appears to be a temporary solution until Ubuntu bugs 346912 and 361205 are fixed.