Ubuntu 7.10: upgrade notes

I went ahead and updated to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) tonight. The whole process went smoothly, with only a couple of hitches, which I thought I’d share.

First off, if you’re running xscreensaver, it will be replaced with gnome-screensaver. They have their reasons for doing this, and I respect them, but still, I like the control I have in the standard fork. If you want to replace gnome-screensaver with xscreensaver (or if it’s been flummoxed in the upgrade), there are very good instructions available here. If you were previously using xscreensaver, only the main package will need re-installation. The xscreensaver-data-extra and xscreensaver-gl-extra packages will still be there.

If you’re using Automatix, it’s disabled. Apparently, it only works on 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), and it craps out with an error message. This creates another problem–changes made to /etc/fstab by Automatix in the previous version cause problems in 7.10.

I have two removable USB drives on which I store audio and backups. One is formatted in VFAT, and is not a problem. The other is a 300GB drive in Reiser, which wouldn’t mount. As it turns out, Automatix had been screwing around in fstab, and I had this entry left over from Feisty Fawn:

# Generated by Automatix
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 reiserfs iocharset=utf8,umask=000 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 vfat iocharset=utf8,umask=000 0 0
/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0
## End of Automatix mounted partitions

Simply commenting out the offending entry with a # allowed control to go back to DBUS, where it should have been all along.

Sound in Flash applications (such as YouTube) may be muted. To fix this, get the name of your soundcard by typing:

asoundconf list

Use the card named (in my case, VT82xx) and type:

sudo asoundconf set-default-card VT82xx

You’ll need to log out and back in.

Also notable is the deletion of several “outdated” packages, though most were irrelevant. It appears that the gnome-python libraries have been merged and simplified, and the Beagle desktop search is now included by default.

The appearance options have been merged into a new, centralized dialog:

And the Compiz effects have been included as well:

There are several security and network enhancements under the hood, but it seems there are few major changes from a UI standpoint. A few programs get a bit of a facelift, but that’s about it.

Also worth noting: Thunderbird is now just “thunderbird,” as opposed to “mozilla-thunderbird.”

Some folks have received errors referring to problems downloading the updates. This is most likely due to old/slow repositories being used. Go into System–>Administration–>Software Sources and, under the “Download from” tab, choose “Other.” This will pop up a this dialog:

Tell it to Select Best Server, and it’ll line up the fastest one for your location, which should stop the problem.

The overall process is very simple and almost completely automated. It will stop to ask before deleting or changing anything really important, but all the changes look safe. Give it about an hour to download (on cable/DSL), and another to compile. From there, it reboots the system (it’s upgrading to kernel 2.6.22), and you’re ready to go.