Ubuntu Goes Dapper
Last night I left the computer ugrading itself up to the latest version of Ubuntu. Okay I didn’t quite leave it to do everything - actually I had to sort it out a few times in the middle of the night, but that’s only because I was checking it whilst I was struggling to sleep due to the heat.
As ever, the upgrade went reasonably smoothly - well until around 3am when Ubuntu’s Update Manager threw a strop and left me with a warning that my PC may be unstable. All was solved by simply switching to Synaptic instead which quickly sorted out the package conflict issues. However the usability of such a move isn’t exactly wonderful. How would a relatively new user cope with such a situation? Why did I have to move from one app to another in the middle of the night?
And then there were the inexplicable problems installing a font package which just wouldn’t work. But in the end, it all got there.
However there’s just a few snags I noticed.
For starters, Mozilla is currently displaying all text specified to be in Arial, in Arial Italic.
Secondly, I can’t get the ATI binary drivers to work for my graphics card for reasons which currently escape me. The default, Ubuntu supplied Radeon drivers work fine, and as I don’t need 3D support, I don’t actually need them, but they installed in the past.
Thirdly, and most inexplicably of all I think, the upgrade process removed OpenOffice 2 from my system!
On the plus side, there’s finally a menu editor for the GNOME menu. This is about the only think I ever missed when I left Mandriva - a simple GUI to the menus should never have been missed out of GNOME in the first place - I’m amazed that it was.
Bet my TV card will still be a bugger to set up though.
Posted on 8 June 2006. See other posts about: Computers
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