Breezy to Dapper dist-upgrade report

[Lionel Dricot]

Hello all,

Today I dist-upgraded the breezy computer of my mother to Dapper,
without telling her. I even managed to distract her during the gnome
splash screen in order to hide the upgrade.

This way, I can see what has changed for her eyes and what are bugs.

1) Performances
****************

Wow !  This is huge ! The computer is a no-more-a-fast-machine : Duron
800 Mhz with 384 Mo of ram.  In Breezy, the swap was used from the
very first minutes of use. After one day, the swap was nearly filled.
(OOo2 always opened, lot of heavy flash websites, evolution, gimp).
Often, you had to wait because "something" was working and consumed
the CPU.

I was hoping an amelioration here. there is no ameliorations. It's
just like I buyed a whole new computer. I can't believe it ! It's
totally huge !

OOo2 takes a long time to start but, once it's started, all is very
snappy. I never reached more than 5% of SWAP in two days of use !  
This is incredible, thank you everyone.

(to be honnest, I also switched from the 386 to k7 kernel. It may help)


2) The upgrade process
*********************

During the dist-upgrade, I had one error with dasher-data. Apt-get -f
install continued the upgrade process. As a long time Debian user, I'm
used to this kind of apt failure when doing a big upgrade. No the case
for everyone.

Also, the switch to openoffice.org (instead of openoffice.org2) was a
bit tricky. Maybe it's because I used backports so I will not report
anything.

2 or 3 packages were not upgraded (like torcs). apt-get install them
after the upgrade showed that there was a lib to remove and another to
install. apt-get dist-upgrade was not willing to do it, I don't know
why.


3) Evolution
***********

Now that we are in Dapper, time to try to work.
After each boot, the first time you launch evolution, you will see a
crash of e-d-s. Argh... that's not nice !  ( bug
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/40713  )

The first thing that my mother saw was that all her folder were opened
! (she has a lot of folder and subfolder).  She was annoyed by that
and didn't understand why. This is a "one shot" bug. Closing them all
and you are done for the next 6 months.

Also, the drafts folder now appears as it was unread !
( bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/40719 )
My mother tried for 3 or 4 minutes to mark mail as read/unread,
relaunching evolution, ...  weird

I also set evolution to use bogofilter instead of SA (wich was not
working at all in evolution, as everyone except evolution developpers
can see). We will see what the result are..


4) OpenOffice
************

The strangest thing with OOo is that it seems like I don't have any
ooo icon ! Very very weird. The menu only shows me metacity default
icon
( bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/40716 )

Once started, I had the "opensymbol" bug. (I cannot find it again in
launchpad but I remember very well talking a lot about it with seb128
and other developpers). In fact, OOo is unusable as all character in
the interface appears like a square.
The workaround is to manually remove
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice/opens___.ttf
I feel that a lot of people will hit this when upgrading

Also, OOo seems slower to launch (and no progress bar in the splash
screen). But the bright side is that it seems snappier once it is
launched (and less RAM hungry).


5) The desktop
*************

Strangely, numlock is more activated when starting the desktop ( bug
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/40718 ). I don't really
understand.

My mother will be very happy to see that now, you can open a picture
in gthumb and directly have the next/previous buttons. That was a huge
annoying bug.

Also, I'm happy to see that the "cannot remove" error when ejecting a
USB memory key is now done. All seems smooth and fast. (altought I
have still a lot of things to test)

6) Browser
***********

If you have the default homepage in Firefox, you will now hit an
error. This is bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/40714

In epiphany, I discovered that, after browsing on a flash website, you
will not be able to edit the URL bar :
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/40717

Hopefully, my mother doesn't have the bug I have in epiphany ( when
closing a tab with a flash animation, the sound is still played until
I close another tab, even non-related at all !)


I really feel that Dapper will be a rocking and polished release. It's
astonishing to see this. Only 6 months and you already say about
breezy : "how can I have used THAT !"
This is really really great...


Awesome !

Ploum