[Hoary] Upgrade notes

[Petri Pennanen]

Hello,

I upgraded my desktop from Warty to Hoary last night. Here are a few
notes for the curious and/or bug-hungry among you...

The upgrade took about two hours; thirty minutes downloading packages
and sixty minutes installing them. The bottleneck speed wise was
probably my 4200rpm hard disk. Overall the process went smoothly. Since
I didn't have Ubuntu-desktop installed I missed a few new packages, but
that was easy to fix later.

During the package installation fontconfig was run once per font
package. It would be more efficient to run it once for all the packages.
The same thing goes for initex (for tetex packages). 

During the installation the mixer-applet and the trash applet crashed
when they got upgraded.

During boot I saw complaints about pci-ehp not being loaded. It looks
like this bug <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1869> so it
should go away if I either append the quiet option to the kernel (in
grub) or blacklist pci-ehp.

After rebooting all fonts looked like they had been immersed in rather
bad liquor. The answer was to be found on this list (thanks to Marius
Gedminas and Oliver Grawert). Since I have a LCD panel the solution was
to run 
	
	sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

enable subpixel rendering and disable auto-hinting. I added a comment to
the wiki <https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/GuideToHoary>.

System sounds play even though I have unselected
System->Preferences->Sound->Sound for events. This has already been
reported as <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2474>.

The first time I put in my usb-stick it was mounted and a icon was added
to the desktop. The second time only a nautilus window opened (no icon
is added). This is already known as
<https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4066>.

Language-support-xx depends on openoffice.org-help-xx and
openoffice.org-l10n-xx. This means that users that don't have
OpenOffice.org installed still must:
     A. Download and install a considerable amount of Open Office
        packages. Openoffice.org-help-sv is 12 MB to download, 21 MB to
        install. Openoffice.org-l10n-sv is 3526 kB to download, the
        install size is 19,6 MB. If you speak a couple of languages this
        adds app pretty quickly.
     B. Install aspell, myspell and mozilla-firefox-locale packages
        instead of the language-support package.
The closest bug I could find is
<https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6438>. I did not file a new
bug since this seems to be a researched decision. 

Using the Human theme the upper window border looks different for normal
and maximized windows. This is now
<https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6850>

Some icons are missing in the firefox-gnome theme. This has already been
reported as <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6016>. Default
(non-gnome) Firefox icons are used in several places (Configuration,
Download, Extensions, Bookmark manager). If this can't be fixed in time
it seems it would be better to ship the default theme.

In firefox the contents of the page info window overflow to the right.
See <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6852>

Firefox can't handle saving settings between Gnome sessions. Instead it
complains that it can't do this when you try to log out. This isn't new,
but now it is <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6860>

In "Add to panel" the icon for the pilot applet is of the wrong size,
making it ugly when it scales. There is also no icon for the terminal
server client applet. These are now bugs
<https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6853> and
<https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6854>.

Gnome-app-installer refuses to start after I removed gthumb and
openoffice. The problem seems to be some missing icon files. For more
info see <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6858>

Rhythmbox has a new entry in the Source view called "iPod" even though
no iPod is (or has been) attached. The problem is that iPod is a Apple
trademark. Hence <https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6861>

While I was writing this mail the King of Weird dropped by and knighted
Evolution. The composer suddenly decided it should erase all text. It
looked like someone was holding down backspace, erasing all text at a
leisurely pace without me being able to stop it. When the "invisible
hand" was done and I pressed Ctrl+Z to undo it's work, the first
paragraphs came back written backwards, like this: 

tuoba koot edargpu ehT
	
...uoy gnoma yrgnuh-gub ro/dna suoiruc eht rof seton wef a era
ereH .thgin tsal yraoH ot ytraW morf potksed ym dedargpu I

,olleH 

The rest of the text came out alright. I have no clue what triggered it.
Perhaps I pressed som magic keystroke. I will file a bug if I can
reproduce it.

I also found a great many cool things in Hoary. From the top of my
head: 
      * There is an application to preview fonts. 
      * The menu layout is much cleaner. 
      * Ubuntu-desktop no longer depends on emacs, vim or open-office!
      * Abiword can handle more complex MS Word documents than in Warty.
      * Abiword finally does Swedish spell checking.
      * Hoary seems to boot a little bit faster than Warty. 
      * Synaptic feels easier to use and looks nicer. 
      * Gnome App Installer and the Ubuntu Update Manager are really
        sleek.
      * VFolders in Evolution work faster without taxing the CPU as
        much.
      * All apps i have tested so far use the GTK file selector.

Great job people!

Now I think I should go outside. However it seems to be dark. Again :-)

- Petri