I’ve been waiting with impatience the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. So I’ve downloaded the CD as soon as it appeared and started upgrading the Ubuntu 8.04 on my DELL Latitude D820 to the new version.

The install

Since I’ve had some problems in the past with the upgrade process I’ve decided to do it simple and just do a clean install on a different partition based on the desktop installer CD. The install went very smoothly with absolutely no problem. The wireless card was detected and so the Nvidia card for which I installed the restricted drivers.

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/.tomboy ~/
#gaim/pidgin
cp -r old/len/.purple ~/
#mozilla
cp -r old/len/.mozilla ~/
#ssh keys
cp -r old/len/.ssh ~/

For evolution I just used the “restore from backup file” method since I had created such an archive before starting the migration. I also had to install spamassasin since otherwise the junk configuration would not work:

apt-get install spamassassin

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.

Very small tweaks

One very annoying thing is the “beep” you get in bash for example so in order to disable the pc speaker you can do a:

rmmod pcspkr

In order to make this permanent edit your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file

#len
blacklist pcspkr
blacklist ipv6

I took advantage of this change to also block ipv6 which I don’t need for now and caused some performance issues for me in the past. And since I was in the networking area I disabled the avahi-daemon also.

Media, other packages

After enabling the apt sources needed and configuring the sources from medibuntu for various media packages I started installing some packages:

  • historical reasons: emacs22-gtk, gqview
  • gps packages (since I am preparing for bicycle trip tomorrow): qlandkarte, gpsbabel
  • work needed: skype, acroread, openvpn
  • etc.

I’ve tested skype, sound play and recording worked fine. In fact I always feel there is some improvement with each version of the intel_hda driver.

I was aware that ubuntu uses now the f-spot manager for photos (for a reason I cannot fully grasp) so I was prepared to replace with gthumb but even if this replacement is no longer possible I’ve found that my camera (Canon A1000) is now supported as a mass storage of some kind so the problem disappeared. So everything was ok on this category also.

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 things I don’t quite like is the separation of a “shut down” and “switch user” panel applets and the very dark/cold default background. I hope I will be equaly content after one week of usage.

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Rodiq » Intrepid Ibex - the review -

[…] i had only a few hours available, but seen on len’s post that the upgrade does not take that long, I gave it a shot, and it was the fastest upgrade […]