Galavanting towards Gutsy Gibbon

When Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" came out I had already been using it for well over a month. I'd been riding the betas since they started and watching it get better and better. So when it finally went "Final" it was somewhat of an anti-climax. This time around I've been somewhat more cautious - I did a trial upgrade to the beta on my laptop about a month ago, but didn't notice huge changes. Since then every time I pressed the update button it would complain about a partial upgrade and try to reinstall 500 updates - something which I never did bother to find the cure for.

Hence my laptop has been languishing in Linux limbo land - mostly booting into Windows XP - and my desktop at work has stayed firmly with Feisty Fawn. But just now, a day before the final release images are due I Bit Torrented an install disk, blew away my old Feisty partitions and installed 7.10 Release Candidate from scratch. I decided to do a clean install mostly because I knew I'd loaded up a lot of experimental stuff on Feisty trying to get various hardware devices on my Dell Inspiron 700m working (the modem and SD-Card reader - with no luck). Since most of my files are online or on a file server at home I know I could blow stuff away and not lose any data so it would save me a lot of time.

As I wiped my old / partition while running in Live mode there was a disconcerting crash report message - I didn't figure out what it was, gparted I assume... Then during the install just at the end there was a message about not being able to unmount a /mnt/ partition. I closed an open application (I'd been browsing with Firefox during the install) and told it to continue and the install completed successfully as best I could tell. After telling it to restart my system it duly ejected the CD I'd burned and then went to a black screen. I wasn't sure if that was the plan - I was expecting it to reboot, but after a few minutes waiting it didn't so a Ctrl-Alt-Del did the trick.

On rebooting I was pleased that I didn't have to do a thing to get the display working properly in 1280x800 mode - something that took a tweak or two last time around. I was also pleased that pretty much everything seems to be working fine although I wasn't expecting to get an immediate prompt about 93 updates, apparently before I'd even connected the network. When I looked on line the Ubuntu site said there were "00" days before 7.10 was available but I didn't see any final release images available yet - the only downloads were for a beta. But I assumed that the final release package versions had probably hit the repositories. Either way I clicked the button and let the updates churn...

After what seemed longer than it took to do the original install all the updates were downloaded and installed with no glitches and it was time to restart once more... Unfortunately it once again failed to shutdown leaving the screen black, the machine on and unresponsive even to Ctrl-Alt-Del. So I had to press and hold the power switch which duly rebooted the machine.

However after rebooting I was happy that I was able to install a software modem driver via the restricted drivers utility, something that had eluded me with Feisty. It was interesting that the restricted driver manager asked me to insert the Ubuntu install disk again to get the driver - that is reminiscent of Windows - wouldn't it be better to just look for it on the net as is standard with Synaptic? Anyway the driver installed just fine but I've yet to test it - realistically I almost never user a dial up modem any more since I nearly always use WiFi or plug my computer into my phone, something that also never worked for me with Feisty.

I was even more delighted when I plugged in an SD Card and it was recognized right away with an offer to import photos from it - again something that completely failed to work for me due to lack of support for my Inspiron 700m's SD-Card reader. Since I usually take my laptop with me on vacation to upload photos from my camera it was really a pain that I couldn't rely on Ubuntu to do that - now there is no excuse and I may finally even have to learn GIMP to ween myself off Photoshop.

Next I decided to try the new screen management feature and see if I could get my laptop working properly with an external display - something which I could only do before with a manual edit or swap of the xorg.conf file and gdm restart. Firstly I noticed that while the applet showed two screens it would only let me enable one at a time. It also had selected an "experimental mode-swapping Intel driver" - when I changed that to the Intel i8x driver it correctly allowed me to select both displays to be active with appropriate display cloning and extension options. So I went for it - selecting the #2 display as a generic 1280x1024 LCD panel. It then told me I'd have to log all users out so I logged out and boom - I'm back to black. Once again I could not revive the system - and no, no TTY session was available either. So I had to reboot with the power switch and of course when it reboots I get no graphics session and no nice message to indicate what happened. After a couple of efforts at reverting the xorg.conf file (xorg.conf.failsafe didn't work) I get back to what I had before.

So next time I try to just plug in some sane value for monitor 2 type and resolution without changing the driver and without actually enabling it. What do you know it still craps out on me and I'm left with a display in 640x480 mode. I can't figure out how to undo the change I made - it just keeps showing the resolution as 640x480 and that is that. So I revert xorg.conf by hand again (I'm surprised there is no "revert" button in the management applet) and restart GDM with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Thankfully I get back to 1280x800 on the laptop display and I decide to leave it at that for now... This wasn't a high priority for me and I figure someone will work out what to do sooner or later.

After finishing with trying to get multiple displays to work I think decided to restart the machine again. This time I'm happy to report it did it just fine and I can also say that 7.10 shutdown and boot times are much improved over Feisty. I'd swear I can reboot back to the login prompt in 30 seconds or less (but I really need to time it).

So, that's my first hour or so of playing around - mostly good, a few warts but nothing unsurmountable. I will update with new observations and progress with the multi-monitor problem as I have news.