There was not much I expected from the new ubuntu Lucid Lynx as I was happy enough with the existing version already. But I a good tradition and because I woke up at 8:30 this Saturday I decided to go ahead and install it on my Dell D820.

The install

The install went smoothly, everything was detected, installed the upgrades, the nvidia drivers and some day to day packages: mozilla-thunderbird, pidgin, emacs.

Post install, migrate data

As usual the first step was to set a root password:

sudo passwd

Then I started to migrate data:

#tomboy notes
cp -r old/len/.config/tomboy/* ~/.config/tomboy
cp -r old/len/.local/share/tomboy/* ~/.local/share/tomboy
(see: http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Directories)
#gaim/pidgin
cp -r old/len/.purple ~/
#mozilla
cp -r old/len/.mozilla ~/
#mozilla-thunderbird
cp -r old/len/.mozilla-thunderbird ~/
#ssh keys
cp -r old/len/.ssh ~/
#skype
cp -r old/len/.Skype ~/
#hamster (time-tracker applet)
cp -r old/len/.gnome2/hamster-applet/ .gnome2

I also restored my .bash_profiles files for each account and added a HISTSIZE=10000 line in /etc/profile to insure enough history buffer for terminal commands. Update: in lucid you have to change the /etc/skel/.bashrc and the .bashrc of each user so the modification in /etc/profile was not taken into account.

Media, other packages

After adding the canonical & medibuntu package sources I started installing some needed software:

  • historical reasons: emacs, gqview
  • gps packages (since I am preparing for bicycle trip tomorrow): qlandkarte, gpsbabel
  • work needed: skype (no longer in repositories, downloaded from skype.com), acroread (even if evince is much faster for what I need), openvpn, sun-java6-jdk, jhead, exiftags, cvs, tightvncserver, x11vnc, xtightvncviewer
  • networking: traceroute meld lsof iptraf nload openvpn ssh wireshark
  • graphics: gimp (not installed by default in Lucid)
  • removed evolution and empathy

I’ve tested skype, sound play and recording worked fine.

Firefox plugins

Since I do some flex development lately I need some degree of control for my flash plugin so instead of installing the flashplugin-nonfree package I made the installation by hand:

cd /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.3/plugins
ln -s /work/Adobe_Flex_Builder_Linux/Player/linux/install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so
ln -s /opt/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Some conclusion

As far as the installation is concerned everything went very fast and I had a working system in under 2h (including writting this article :) The only thing I did not liked was that the indicator applet does not work vertically. As a long time windowmaker user I prefer a vertical, right side panel with icons but the indicator applet does not know how to handle this. Lost some time with this and did not arrived to the desired result. All in all, not much to say, a new ubuntu version. The only improvement I noticed was a much faster boot. Let’s see in a week time.