Groaning Gibbon - Ubuntu 7.10 disappoints

After my previous post last night I spent a few more hours (yes hours!) playing with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10. I discovered that it is far less stable on my machine than I'd hoped and thus far the new features have underwhelmed me compared to the loss of functionality it has brought - hence there has been some considerable groaning from me as wart after wart appears (I know Warty Warthog was a much older release).

I discovered that the black (or blank) screen of death I'd been experiencing happens whenever I log out. After much searching around I discovered that other people had been getting this problem with Feisty months ago but it was a new one to me. There were a few suggested fixes - from changing the Gnome gconf file to always restart the XServer after logging out, to switching to a different graphics drive, and to disabling compiz screen effect. I tried all three and only disabling screen effects seemed to cure the problem. I still see the black screen problem on occasion so I'm assuming there is some bug in the "Experimental Intel mode-switching driver" the default install gave me. But I don't want to move back to the i810 driver because that doesn't recognize my i855GM adapter and hence I get ugly 1024x768 instead of 1280x800 resolution. That can be fixed with an hack - one that I used with Feisty but apparently that doesn't work Gutsy and I don't have the time to play with it.

Then I discovered that Suspend mode is problematic - it either doesn't work at all, taking me to the black screen of death, or when it recovers the screen is all messed up and I have to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get back, thus logging myself out and losing all work in process, rather defeats the point. So I tried Hibernate and started to find that is not 100% reliable either and when it does come back from Hibernate my network doesn't work because the NetworkManager process seems to have gone wild eating up all the CPU. I have to kill it and then start another from the command line. Sigh.

And the network manager continues to not do it for me - in my building I see about 30 or more WiFi networks, trying to pick mine from a scrolling menu with no search short cuts is just a big pain - as it was in Fesity. I was really hoping they would have fixed this for the better.

Also on the networking front it seems that compatibility with Windows networking is still big pain in the butt to set up. I noticed during the installation they went out of their way to try and migrate Windows user files, so how about making Ubuntu Samba/WINS friendly out of the box - or at least a one click configuration. As it is I'm still stuck trying to figure out/remember the hoops I have to jump through to be able to ping my Windows hosts by name and browse the Windows network because it sure doesn't work out of the box.

What else - well suppose I did want to try the desktop effects - I've no idea what all the keyboard accelerators are or how to configure them to my liking. I had it pretty much down with the optional Compiz install + Berly. But in Gutsy apparently there is some missing advanced configuration - an Advanced button under System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects. I've seen other people say use it to configure compiz-fusion, and a whole bunch more say "No I don't have it", some more say you have to install a settings manager, and others saying that wont install with Gutsy. Oh well. Since I did a clean install I've no idea what is going on...

So between video problems, suspend/hibernate problems, and network problems I haven't really been that impressed. I guess its just my luck to be using an older laptop but really since it was working pretty much fine with Feisty these issues really look like regressions to me.

UPDATE: I tried apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager and it worked for me and I now have a "Preferences" button on the Visual Effects tab. I suspect that those who had it fail probably did upgrades or already had pre-Gutsy Compiz packages install that conflict with the new compiz-fusion stuff.