This ubuntu installation was the bit of fun expected after a few tiresome weeks so I grabbed the cd while still hot and started the installation. As usual the install went smoothly except the fact that I probably mistyped my usual password so I had to modify the /etc/shadow afterward to log in.
I was not expecting many changes but there are some graphical changes, the gdm seemed changed and after login I was greeted with a “DISK HAS MANY BAD BLOCKS” message since now there is a tool (palimpsest) which reads the S.M.A.R.T Hdd data. I had a bad sector re-allocated in the past and verified the SMART status without any error so this is probably a bug:
root@black:/home/len# smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 10048 -
# 2 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 8033 -
# 3 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 6872 -
Another change is the lack of pidgin which has been replaced by empathy. I decided to give it a try but it was a bit of a disappointing. The interface is uglier and it crashed when trying to set a photo in yahoo. I can understand that empathy supports facebook chat and msn audio but this is not high on my priority list so I reverted back to pidgin in 10 mins.
I did not tested the ubuntu one net storage yet but migrating the data was as easy as usual. This time I did not have to migrate evolution since I’m quite happy with thunderbird in the month or so since I am using it. All in all I was having everything configured in under 30 mins.
My new Bamboo1 tablet from Wacom worked as it did in Ubuntu 9.04 and I installed the configuration applet from here but I’ve had the same problem with relative mode. This time the mode configuration was not even active. Pressure is working but only in absolute mode.
In conclusion I had the bit of fun expected combined with the short thrill of thinking I’ll loose all my data :)