Last night I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (yes, I know it’s been available for months) as I was getting sick of the X server constantly crashing in 8.04 (I think this was due to an instability in the via display driver). As ever, I faced a couple of hurdles during the reinstall.
Firstly, the X server in 8.10 wouldn’t load at all – soon after the mouse cursor appeared, it would freeze. I tried loading the installer in safe graphics mode, which worked, so I went ahead with the installation, hoping that the problem would be confined to the live CD. How optimistic of me. I eventually deduced that the problem was in the openchrome driver (which replaces the via driver in 8.04) and the workaround was to add Option "XaaNoImageWriteRect" to xorg.conf. This bug was fixed 2 weeks ago so hopefully Ubuntu 9.04 won’t have this problem.
The second major problem I had was that Network Manager would forget my static IP settings each time I restarted. I dunno, maybe “major” is a strong word, but it is enough to stop me being able to SSH in. The solution is to remove Network Manager and edit the configuration files directly.
Now that I’ve got those two problems fixed, the system seems to be behaving pretty well, and whatever was causing the X server to restart under 8.04 has been fixed. That’s my only reason for upgrading, really.
Here’s an approximate list of my post-upgrade steps.
1. Edit my xorg.conf to add in all the relevant details for my monitor. Ubuntu has never been able to detect it, so if I want to run it at its native resolution, I have to copy-paste the “Monitor” section.
2. sudo apt-get install abiword audacity audacious avidemux checkgmail deluge denyhosts gftp grip hddtemp hydrogen k3b lame libk3b2-extracodecs mednafen mozilla-thunderbird nautilus-image-converter nautilus-open-terminal nautilus-wallpaper openssh-server openvpn pmount quodlibet samba soundconverter swh-plugins thunar ubuntu-restricted-extras vlc wine xmbmon zsnes
3. Remove boatloads of crap (including rhythmbox, transmission, tomboy, fspot and all the games)
4. Recreate file shares and shortcuts.
5. Inevitably, some of the multimedia keys on my keyboard will have stopped working, and I’ll have to do a load of faffing about with xev and xmodmap and gconf-editor again. This can wait, though.
6. Set a static IP (see above)
7. Install Spotify