warty to hoary - comments and problems to solve

[Carlos Ribeiro]

Hi.

I've been using Warty since november, and I have to say that not only
I loved it, but also, that it made me fall in love with gnome - which
I thought previously to be impossible to do.

I was thinking about migrating to hoary for some time now. I was
already needing a few packages from time to time, and relied on the
backported repository. Finally yesterday I had to make a decision; the
newest eric3 (a fantastic Python IDE) depended on updated PyQt
bindings. I found one pre-compiled package from hoary and decided to
give it a try. Initially I installed a few hoary packages alongside
warty, without problems. I worked yesterday with Eric3 until late at
night, and left home. Before this I decided to make a dist-upgrade,
and ordered to download all the packages.

Today morning, I did the upgrade. It was quite a ride, not smooth at
all. it must be noted that I expected this, anyway. I had the
following problems:

-- First of all, gnome won't load. gdm was removed and not
reinstalled. After I reinstalled it, it came to me that things were
much worse than I thought. gnome & nautilus were almost totally
removed, and I had to reinstall them.

-- During the reinstallation of nautilus, a problem: it seems that
some libraries were renamed. The old libnautilus2-2 is now
libnautilus-extensions. However, not all packages were updated, and
that has lead to a nightmare of broken dependencies that took me a
couple hours to figure out.

(to make a shortcut, I tried first to install the
gnome-desktop-environment meta package. It has dependencies that in
turn depends on both incompatible libnautilus versions mentioned
above).

-- After I finally reinstalled everything, I was able to log in again.
It must be said that the new desktop is a real improvement over the
old one. However, there are two things that are buggin me:

1. the keyboard is not working as before. It's just one key missing -
the slash/question mark. It's a small problem, but it's incredibly
annoying.

2. The new taskbar panel copied the annoying behavior from XP: it
groups similar processes in a single button. I don't like that. But I
couldn't figure out where to change it. There is not any obvious
location inside the .gnome or .gnome2 directories. Googling wasn't
very helpful either, as I only could find references to the same
behavior in KDE or XP (even when I include the word 'gnome' in the
search expression!).

Overall, the experience was good, even with all the problems. Ubuntu
really seem to be heading towards a nice release, a real improvement
over warty, Thanks to all involved! And of course, if someone can help
me with my final problems...

-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com