Three Wise Men

Image via Wikipedia

Maverick Meerkat is still beta software, so your mileage my vary. Plus, Ubuntu upgrades are like carrying nitroglycerin around. Most of the times if you are careful everything will be ok, then sometimes you step on something, stumble and everything blows up in your face. Why on earth would you want to upgrade then? Because you’re adventurous and you want to live on the edge, right? Upgrade worked for me on my computer. I had a minor problem with Nvidia graphics card which was solved quickly. In any case, if you are happy with Lucid Lynx and you have a stable production environment, then you should probably wait. Final release is scheduled for October 10th and most of the show stopper bugs should be gone by that time.

There are a few things that you need to take care before you upgrade. First you need to install update manager core.

$ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Then it would be wise to install all the updates for your current installation.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Now you are all set and ready to go. A warning, that you should backup your important configuration files and your data, would be appropriate. Consider yourself warned.

$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d

With this command you will start the upgrade process. After upgrade manager calculates on what it has to do you will be notified and you will get a chance to abort the upgrade. This is your last warning. After your start the upgrade you should not interrupt it. If you do that you will end up with a broken Ubuntu and tears in your eyes. Relax, sit back and enjoy watching how packets are installed. Or perhaps, grab a bite.

Nvidia problems

When the upgrade was finished I rebooted and I was greeted with text mode login prompt.

Ubuntu maverick (development branch) thefish tty1
 
thefish login:

(Yes, my hostname is thefish.) If you do not get a nice login window as you used to then first thing you need to do is to inspect your Xorg log file.

$ less /var/log/Xorg.0.log

If you are running Nvidia and you have a dual monitor setup then you will see this error in your log file.

[    10.038] ================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================
[    10.038] This server has a video driver ABI version of 8.0 that this driver does not officially support.  Please check http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X server with a supported driver ABI.
[    10.038] =================================================================
[    10.038] (EE) NVIDIA: Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.
[    10.038] (II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
[    10.038] (II) Unloading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/nvidia_drv.so
[    10.038] (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module requirement mismatch, 0)
[    10.038] (EE) No drivers available.
[    10.038] Fatal server error:
[    10.038] no screens found

Fortunately the fix for this is displayed right there on the screen, you will have to edit your Xorg configuration file and add one more option to the ServerLayout section so that it looks similar to this:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen         0  "Screen0" 0 0
    Screen1        "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
    Option         "IgnoreABI" "True"
EndSection

You only need to add IgnoreABI option! Your Xorg configuration file is most likely /etc/X11/xorg.conf. After you made the change restard gdm and Xorg will start and you will see login window. No need to reboot your computer.

$ sudo restard gdm

You are good to go, login and start exploring and trying out new stuff.

New stuff and the problems

First thing I noticed is the default background. What is the deal with those big orange blobs? Nobody knows, but they say that default background will be replaced before final release.

Default background

Windicators are slowly coming into play. When clicking on a sound icon, or better sound windicator, in the panel you will be present with more options than before. Now you can launch Rythmbox from it and when it is running you can also control it from here. One icon less in the panel, which is good. The bad part is that Rythmbox simply quits when you click close button in the main window. It will have to stay open if you want to listen to the music. To make things worse, minimizing will not get rid of the task list icon and you will have to move Rythmbox to another desktop to get rid of the clutter. On Ubuntu forums there is already a debate on this subject.

Sound windicator and Rythmbox

Gwibber got support for lists, inline pictures from TwitPic and alike and direct messages for Twitter and Identi.ca accounts. Also the infamous OAuth¹ is supported, it has to be since Twitter made it mandatory. Gwibber was also upgraded with a new database; say goodbye to the slow couch database and welcome SQLite. This means, more speed and no more syncing between different computers. A reasonable trade-off.

New Gwibber

After that I gave a shot to Shotwell, a new photo manager. I had to wait for quite some time for Shotwell to import my 30.000 pictures library, but I was pleasantly surprised when it imported my older JPEG images and raw Nikon images that were taken more recently. You will be able to adjust few image settings, but for more complex editing you will have to set external editor. Gimp by default. Most of the other software was upgraded, Gnome in this release it carries version number 2.31.92, kernel will be 2.6.35-19 Among other changes I also noticed that Evolution will display emails in threads by default.

In the end, I can say that 10.10 is a next step in the evolution of Ubuntu, few minor changes here and there and Ubuntu community proved once again that they can deliver. Ubuntu 10.10 feels faster than 10.04, but this might only be my feeling. For a proper benchmark you will have to wait for the final release. All in all the first impression is good and now the only thing left is hope that one of the future releases will be named as Horny Hippo.