Ubuntu 10.04 Released, Bumpy Upgrade
Ubuntu 10.04 was released two days ago. And I spent the last two days upgrading my workstation/server to it. The good news is that the upgrade process went smoothly. All the downloading, installing, configuring, removing of packages went as prescribed.
I encountered two issues after the final "Upgrade is completed, please reboot your computer."
The first is, in my opinion, a serious flaw: No window manager is started after I logged in. All programs started as windows without any decorations—no title bar, no border, all went to top-left corner with not way to move them, no Alt-Tab, no key board focus for all but the first started application. In other words, it didn't work!
The fix is simple, if you know how. And I do. First of all, I need to start a window manager. I just did a Super-Spacebar (where Super is the Windows key) to activate Gnome-Go and then typed in "metacity [ENTER]" to start the metacity window manager. This brought the borders and title bars to all the windows so that I can work again. I then went on the internet to find out that I'm not the only one having this problem. Anyone who have "tweaked" their window manager settings in a certain way got this treatment. I also found out that the default window manager for Ubuntu 10.04 is /usr/bin/compiz. So I added an entry for it in System->Preferences->Startup Applications.
The second issue is also a serious one. It seems to me that this upgrade overrode many of my configuration/package/tools choices. For example, my Sun JDK 1.6.0_20, which I just received through Ubuntu 9.10's software update mechanism a few hours before the upgrade to 10.04, is deleted. A little Googling revealed that for Ubuntu 10.04, the sun-java6 packages are moved from the multiverse to the Canonical partners repository. All I have to do is to add the Canonical partners repository to Synaptic Package manager and install the sun-java6 packages from there.
There are minor configuration changes here and there that I have to tweak to make my old setup work. An example is that the AJP/1.3 protocol is now disabled by default for Tomcat.
One thing that cost me some time is Thunderbird. After the upgrade, it decided to re-download and re-index all of my IMAP mails. It took hours.
Other than that, the upgrade seems to have been a success. I can still watch YouTube (see update at bottom), play MP3s, play DVDs, go on the internet, etc. For the first time, my Chinese input method setup was not rendered unusable by the upgrade.
The theme of the UI has changed dramatically. I'm not sure I like the new purple terminals:
How about you?
[Update (Sun May 2 11:38:44 CDT 2010)] I just discovered that Flash stopped working in my Firefox browser. When I said YouTube still worked yesterday, I was using Google Chrome. I uninstalled and then reinstalled the flashplugin-nonfree and flashplugin-installer packages to fix the problem.