Upgraded to Feisty

Last night I did something I promised myself I would never do again. I upgraded my laptop Ubuntu install from version 6.10 (edgy) to the herd5 release of feisty, still in testing, well until late April anyway. The upgrade required me to do a complete re-install, reasons later, and that is something, that during semester, I promised, I would never do again. All in all I’m impressed, but, the Ubuntu hype has warn off, so really, I’m impressed that this beta software works terrifically well, more than being impressed with the software itself. Kudos to the Ubuntu team.

I had a few little issues, which I thought I might write about:

• I had to reinstall from scratch. Basically the upgrade wizard would not accept my boot partition. It was too small. 50MB or so with 25MB free. The installer wanted more. There are other options, such as resizing the partitions, yes, but I chose to use the opportunity to do a clean out of the cruft I had installed.
• I’m more of a KDE fan, so I chose to install KDE and use it instead of Gnome. My issues came from power management and the login manager (kdm). Problem #1: I personally prefer gdm as a login manager, however it appears that the version of KDE installed with feisty doesn’t work with gdm. I could only logout, where previously I could suspend, restart, etc… This issue was resolved by using kdm. However, the default Kubuntu theme for kdm, well, lets just say I don’t like it. Changing the theme is easy enough, install kdmtheme and if you want kde-kdm-themes and then use the KDE control panel. Problem #2: The normal KDE control panel is hidden, by System Settings. I needed to run it manually with the command ‘kcontrol’. That isn’t a biggie, but it does conflict with the otherwise great menu and UI setup that comes by default with the various Ubuntu distributions.

Ubuntu is the new Linux buzz word, so there is an enormous library of how-to tutorials on the Internet, I wont replicate any of that here. Search, remember Google is your friend, or Yahoo! will also work. Would I recommend Feisty? If you have used Linux before, or feel confident go for it. Otherwise hang off until the official release: April 19-20 (depending on your time zone).

Back to using the computer now.