Is Maverick a perfect 10?

Yesterday was the much-vaunted 10.10.10: October 10, 2010. The folks at Ubuntu went all out and released the next Ubuntu version, 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat," yesterday instead of the usual end of the month.

This may very well be the first time, since adopting Ubuntu as my primary operating system, that I will successfully resist the push to upgrade immediately, for two reasons.

First, I simply don't have the space for it. If I can back up 40 GB of data and clear it off my system, then I can consolidate my files and use an older hard drive as a scratch partition or two, for trying out various distros. Until then, I'm stuck with what I've got.

Second, until I've had a chance to test it out - by which I mean more than test-driving a live CD - I'm not swapping Lucid for Maverick. I'm having issues with Lucid, not the least of which is the quality of full-motion video. My previous distro was Jaunty, which worked just fine. However, in the meantime, something has changed - I assume the default video driver for Radeon video cards is to blame. Until I see evidence that this has improved, or I upgrade to a better PC, I'm not taking a chance on worse performance than I already have.

In the meantime, I'm reading reviews and comments in the blogosphere. Right now, they seem to range anywhere between "best Ubuntu ever" and "worst Ubuntu ever." So time will tell.

Lucid Lynx, two months later

Ubuntu basically has two release cycles for its desktop products: there are the regular releases, every six months in April and October, and then these include the Long Term Support (LTS) releases, which come along every two years. The regular release cycle tends to include new features and new technology, while the LTS releases tend to be more tried-and-true, and as the name suggests, are supported for three years after their release instead of the usual 18 months. Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, is an LTS release. After the travesty that was my upgrade to Ubuntu Karmic last October, I couldn't wait for Lucid to come along.

I learned two related lessons thanks to Karmic: first, don't rely on the upgrade-in-place option to work, and (since it might not) keep your home directory on a separate partition from your root file system. After downgrading back to Jaunty from Karmic, I implemented these ideas about halfway: that is, I kept my home directory where it was, but moved my data onto a different partition. This time around, I was ready to finish the job: I copied all my data over to that other partition, then reorganized it in a /home/ransom directory hierarchy.

Then, I downloaded and burned the ISO image for Lucid. My third lesson learned was not to upgrade instantaneously. I waited two days. I guess I have a bit to learn yet. (By the time Maverick Meerkat comes out this fall, I'll also have a "scratch" partition I can use for playing with new releases without risking damage to my default setup.)

As usual, the installation from CD-ROM was simple and uneventful, and there were no issues to deal with before restarting my PC and booting into my beautiful, new, eggplant-coloured installation of Lucid. Then the hard job, customizing and configuring, began.

Viva la resolution

The first snag I hit was with my screen resolution under GNOME, my preferred desktop environment. This came as no surprise. I own an Acer 22" flat panel with a native resolution of 1680x1050. I've never seen any driver for my antique Radon 7000 AGP that supports that resolution out of the box - in any operating system, even though it is technically capable of it. Ubuntu defaults to a lower resolution and an incorrect aspect ratio, which is hard on the eyes. Previously, I've been able to fix this by adding a new video mode to Xorg.conf (the main configuration file for X Windows), but either Lucid doesn't use it anymore, or it's been buried so deep that it's impossible to find. Fortunately, after a little googling, I found a workable solution, which I'll detail in a separate post in a few days.

Bring out the Gimp!

After the base installation was complete and GNOME was a little easier on the eyes, the next step was to reinstall my applications. Thanks to Larry Bushey of Going Linux, I learned a straightforward way to migrate all my applications after a clean Ubuntu install.

1. Before doing the install, start a terminal window and type:
   dpkg --get-selections > installed-pkgs.txt
   This will save a list if your currently installed packages to a text file named installed-pkgs.txt. Save this file somewhere safe (like a USB drive).
2. Install the new version of Ubuntu as usual.
3. Once the install is finished, copy installed-pkgs.txt back to the system (for example, to your home directory), start a terminal and type:
   dpkg --set-selections < installed-pkgs.txt
   This command tells the package manager to install the packages listed in that file.

You can hear Larry explain this himself, on his 12th appearance on Computer America, in Going Linux Episode #61. He also warned me via email that this process may not install everything on the list (so it is necessary to install some packages manually), and that this is more likely while downgrading than upgrading.

I opted not to do this at all, as my return to Jaunty was intended to be transitional, and the number of applications I'd actually installed between January and April was minimal. So I did the whole thing manually. First and foremost amongst my preferred applications is the Gimp. This brings me to my first pet peeve with this Ubuntu release.

Canonical, in their infinite wisdom, has decided not to include the Gimp on the Lucid CD. I question the rationale behind this. Granted, most people don't need such a powerful graphics tool when all they really want to do is get rid of redeye in their photos or post cheesy home videos to YouTube. Hence they have included F-Spot for digital photos and Pitivi for video editing. Personally, I have no use for the former and will likely never use the latter. Also granted, the Gimp is readily available from the repositories. However, this was the "killer app" that pushed me toward wanting to move to Linux in the first place - even though it wasn't too long before it was ported over to Windows anyway. Relegating the Gimp to the repos means it's no longer part of that user experience when someone boots up that live CD for the first time.

But one little pet peeve wasn't about to stop me from forging ahead. However, an issue with the Synaptic Package Manager, threatened to do that. Every time I tried to search for packages, Synaptic would commit suicide. Ugh. Fortunately, there's more than one way to download and install packages, and the new Software Center rescued the situation. (And since my next reboot, Synaptic has been perfectly stable, which made me happy, since it is my preferred package management tool. Meanwhile, the Software Center seems to have gone all flaky. Go figure.)

But apart from that, the upgrade went pretty well, and here's the happy result. new Linux, new look, new Doctor, new wallpaper:

Kicking the tires

For some reason, the decision to move the window buttons in the new default Ambiance theme to the left of the title bar instead of the right has generated a not inconsiderable controversy around the Linux blogosphere. I quite like the new theme, and haven't bothered to change back to Clearlooks, which I've been using since 2007. At work, I'm accustomed to using both Windows (buttons on the right) and OS X (buttons on the left), so I didn't see that it made any difference what side the buttons were on. I felt the whole controversy was a tempest in a teapot.

However, after the first month, I still found myself habitually aiming for right-hand buttons. So, based on a tip from the OMG! Ubuntu! blog, I installed Ubuntu Tweak and used it to move them over to the right. Now, after another month, I ironically find myself habitually searching for them on the left. I can't win. But it's still a tempest in a teapot.

More serious is my degraded video performance. With Jaunty, full-motion video (at a typical resolution of, say, 640x480) played back smoothly at any size, including fullscreen. Now, it seems that only a small display window will show full-motion video smoothly. Anything else is choppy, and anything approaching fullscreen resembles a slide show more than a movie. This is true of all video players that I have tried: Totem, VLC, MPlayer, and xine. To make matters worse, switching Totem to fullscreen mode actually scrambles the entire display - unrecoverably. It's necessary to get out of X entirely and restart it. I can find no help for this situation online, and if it's an unresolved bug, I don't know enough about the process yet to file a report. If anyone has an answer, please feel free to offer a suggestion. This is a major annoyance, as I like using my great big monitor to watch DVDs.

If I can find a fix for that one thing, though, I'll be quite happy. Lucid Lynx seems to be a good, solid release. Just for the record, I'm approaching 14 days, 6 hours of continuous uptime, which must be some kind of personal record.

My next post will detail my video resolution fix. After that, I'll stop talking upgrades (at least for the next four months!) and discuss some of the other issues I've had to resolve, as well as some of the software applications I use regularly, and why.

My Karmic Upgrade Travesty

Since I first installed Ubuntu "Feisty" on this PC, I've pretty much kept the OS current thanks to the in-place upgrade option that regularly appears in the Update Manager whenever a new version of Ubuntu is released. The nice thing about a free, downloadable operating system is that there's no risk, so you have nothing to lose by keeping it up-to-date.

Or so I thought, up until 8 months ago.

Late last October, Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" arrived. Since I'd heard good things about it, I was more eager than ever to move on from Jaunty. Little did I know at the time that I was just one click away from about two months of hardship. Some of the changes to the OS were just a little too drastic for my aging PC.

Amongst the tragedies I had to endure:

• Most obviously, compiz-fusion desktop effects wouldn't work for me. Actually, they did work - but at the expense of being able to see my desktop wallpaper, which was hidden behind a big black rectangle. I knew it was supposed to be there, because a tiny stripe of it was actually visible behind my semi-transparent, top GNOME panel. My best guess is that my old ATI Radeon 7000 AGP video card (a component so old and obsolete that it cannot be replaced, and if it fails will force me into completely replacing this system) was no longer supported by Karmic's kernel. Consequences: In addition to losing some striking desktop eye candy, neither dock application that I had been using, awn and Docky, would work without a compositor. Solution, take 1: I tried switching to Metacity instead of compiz. While it worked, it ran so slowly by comparison that the computer was next to unusable. Solution, take 2: I turned off compositing entirely. Apparently I had to make the choice between rotating cubes and drop shadows on the one hand, and a Doctor Who-themed desktop on the other. I opted for the latter. In place of Docky or awn, I quickly mocked up a "dock" with another GNOME panel and a bunch of launchers.
• Crashy, crashy, crashy. Karmic's default 2.6.31 kernel locked up totally about once a day - sometimes more. Consequences: Unnecessary downtime. Endless disk integrity checks. Impatience and frustration. Solution, take 1: I tried downgrading to Jaunty's kernel, which I had not uninstalled, thank goodness. It was rock solid, which meant I could do my thing without fear of losing my work unexpectedly, although it would not play any audio. Solution, take 2: I somehow hit upon the idea of upgrading to a development kernel (at the time, 2.6.32), which worked fine for me until Karmic's normal updates got to 2.6.31-17, at which point everything seemed to be back to normal.>
• "Broken" fonts. And when I say "broken," I mean that for some reason I never ascertained, the default UI font actually rendered with bits missing, like someone had taken a hammer to a typewriter. And the longer the PC was on, the worse the problem Got. Consequences: Over time some drop-down menus became very difficult to read. Solution: I changed the display font to Liberation Sans. No big deal; on the contrary, it was a big improvement, and something I might have done anyway if I'd known.
• My iPod Nano was no longer recognized as a media player: Karmic mounted it like it was just a USB drive. Consequences: Most media players no longer recognized that there was an iPod mounted, and consequently would not allow me to transfer files to it. Hence I lost the use of Amarok 1.4, my preferred media player. Solution: Fortunately, gPodder and gtkpod didn't seem to care. I use and love gPodder for managing podcasts, and although gtkpod is far from perfect, at least it allows me to move music on and off the iPod.

Those were the major annoyances. Apart from those, there were a number of other irritating little quirks that eventually wore me down from thinking I could just ride it out until Lucid came along, to deciding to take the drastic step of downgrading back to Jaunty.

Now I was caught with another problem: there's no way to do an in-place downgrade. It would be impossible to install an older version of Ubuntu without completely erasing my existing Linux drive partition. And since the majority of my personal data and music were sitting on that partition, this was obviously not an option. I had to rework how my data was organized.

Fortunately, GParted allows existing partitions to be resized, so all I had to do was "walk" it from one partition to another while incrementally sizing each. This was a simple enough task but I wasn't expecting it to take two days. One resize took literally 21 hours to finish, and I was a hair's breadth away from thinking something had gone wrong. Fortunately I had a little faith left that all was going as intended, as aborting the job would probably have been catastrophic.

After that, the downgrade went just fine. There were a few things I missed: the newest versions of some of my favourite applications (such as Firefox or OpenOffice) weren't in the Jaunty repositories and it took me a little while to figure out how to upgrade those. (I actually started using regular builds of the development versions of Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox, amusingly codenamed Shredder and Namoroka, rather than stable releases. Let's just say there's a good reason you're warned not to do that on a production system, and leave it at that.)

Lessons learned

First: don't be so quick to jump on the latest upgrades. This is Linux: the computer will not blow up if you hang on to the old version a while longer until some lingering bugs are worked out on the new one. OK, I didn't really learn this lesson. I resisted the upgrade to Lucid for two whole days. But I was a little smarter about it.

Second, don't use the option to upgrade in place. I had had no problem with this previously, but it's taken just one bad experience to change my mind. In the long run, a fresh install is probably the safer option.

Third, it pays to have your home directory stored on a separate partition from the root directory. That way, you can clear your root partition without worrying about your data, and whenever you reinstall a new OS, you can simply mount the data partition as /home. Another nifty side effect is that all the configuration files for your applications are preserved, too. Supposedly if you re-create your user accounts in the same order as the originals, even permissions will be preserved, although I have not been able to experiment with this on my single-user system.

Better yet, put your root and home partitions on completely different physical drives. That way, if the drive containing the root partition ever blows up, it won't take your home directory with it.

My Jaunty downgrade was meant to be transitional, so I didn't go all the way with these changes. But when Lucid finally came out in April, I was ready for it.