Weiqi Gao's Observations - ubuntu tag

Ubuntu 10.04 Released, Bumpy Upgrade

Sun, 02 May 2010 02:54:13 GMT

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.

Ubuntu 9.10: First Impressions

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:38:21 GMT

For all who read my last blog entry from yesterday before my web server went offline—and then back—let me just mention up front that the upgrade went as flawlessly as it can be. So, go ahead and click the upgrade button and watch your Ubuntu 9.04 system morph into a Ubuntu 9.10 system. (After backing up your vital data of course.)

For those who want to learn how my upgrade fared, read on.

Thu 29 Oct 2009 11:59:05 PM CDT

After retrieving some meta-information, the Ubuntu distribution upgrade utility—karmic—informed me that some applications are obsoleted...

support-for-some-applications-ended.ogv

Fri 30 Oct 2009 12:03:29 AM CDT

... and the number and size of the packages removed, installed and upgraded. I thought the 5 hours of download time was reasonable.

upgraded-packages.ogv

Fri 30 Oct 2009 12:13:08 AM CDT

At this time, I was thinking of clicking the download button and go to sleep. However, after the download started, it tells its going to take 17 hours.

Fri 30 Oct 2009 07:32:52 AM CDT

By Friday morning, all downloads were done, and the installation process had been started for a while. However, it was waiting for my approval of going forward with stopping some processes. I clicked the "Forward" button and got the following screen. By this time my website was down. But I had to go to work.

My blog came back up shortly after I arrived at work.

Fri 30 Oct 2009 05:43:04 PM CDT

When I got home in the afternoon, another user interaction dialog was waiting for me. After that it was time for removing obsolete packages:

remove-obsolete-packages.ogv

Fri 30 Oct 2009 06:02:05 PM CDT

That quickly lead to the "Restart the system to complete the upgrade" dialog.

The New System

The first thing I noticed is the new theme. Title bars of windows are darker now. Firefox 3.5 is the default browser. It feels a lot faster than Firefox 3.0, which was the default for 9.04.

And obviously, this blog is running just fine after the upgrade, with Tomcat 6.0.20 and Sun Java 1.6.0_16.

Ubuntu 9.10 Is Here...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:26:03 GMT

...and I'm about to click that button.

See you on the other side of the upgrade.