A Gutsy upgrade story

[David Vincent]

Hi List.

I spent today upgrading my two crappiest laptops to Xubuntu 7.10 and 
wanted to share some of my thoughts with you.  Both were u pdated by 
running "update-manager -d" as suggested in the Ubuntu pages on 
upgrading to the RC of 7.10.  Both of these were fresh installed from 
the 7.04 alternate CD and only used software from the Ubuntu 
repositories - no hand compiling etc. etc.  Also no fancy graphics or 
anything here either - NeoMagic MagicGraph GPUs (I know - eww!) and all 
open source drivers for everything except the wireless cards.  Both use 
DLink DWL-G630 cards which need the Atheros driver found in the 
linux-restricted-modules package.  For various reasons my wireless 
network uses WEP 128bit - don't get on me about it, I know exactly what 
I am doing and why.

Laptop #1 is an IBM e390 - P2-300 with 256mb RAM.  It supports ACPI and 
when running Feisty had problems properly suspending and hibernating 
mostly to do with bringing the network back up when it resumed.  I was 
able to make it work for hibernation by editing the hibernate.sh script 
and adding a line reading "ifdown ath0".  I also had to add "acpi-force" 
to my /boot/grub/menu.lst file in the appropriate spots so the machine 
would shutdown and otherwise manage the power properly.

Under Gutsy suspend and hibernate work flawlessly.  Power up and power 
down work flawlessly.  My network reconnects without any problems.  I 
still need to force ACPI support as the BIOS is from 1999 and fails the 
cutoff date.  In fact this machine seems to be working better after the 
upgrade.  I played with it for a few hours and surfed the net a bit 
which is really all this machine does anymore so that feeling may 
change.  The only issue I have is suddenly XFCE is demanding a password 
when I resume from suspend or hibernation.  Weird.

Laptop #2 is a Dell Inspiron 3200 of equal vintage to the first.  It has 
less RAM at 140mb and is a little slower at 266mhz but actually feels 
snappier than the IBM - probably from the 512k L2 cache (the IBM has 256k).

Under Feisty this laptop would not hibernate.  It would suspend but 
never bring the network back up requiring a "sudo ifdown ath0 && sudo 
ifup ath0" in a terminal and sometimes that wouldn't even work.  It lost 
its swapfile one time and after a resume from suspend sometimes Firefox 
would race for a while, consume the whole CPU and generally be a pain in 
the ass.  Manually bringing down the network before suspend didn't help, 
but making sure Firefox was closed before trying any fancy power stuff 
always was a good idea.  I was ready to get rid of this machine thinking 
it had some hardware problems.

Under Gutsy all my problems are gone.  Suspend works.  Hibernate works. 
  Firefox no longer races.  This machine is noticeably faster than 
before.  I used it for a few hours surfing the web and enjoyed it again. 
  With the network problems gone I can again use it as a house laptop 
for anyone to pop onto and surf the web.

Issues under Gutsy include not upgrading my Flash Player during the 
install (should it?  I installed it originally via the 
ubuntu-restricted-extras package and since that package has been 
upgraded and the version of Flash has incremented since then I feel 
Ubuntu should have upgraded this software along the way.  I may be wrong 
about that...) and also suddenly requiring a password when it resumes 
from suspend or hibernation.  Editing /etc/default/acpi-support and 
commenting out the LOCK_SCREEN=true line fixed this problem on the Dell 
but not the IBM - weird.

Also as long as I use the power management software to suspend/hibernate 
I'm ok, but if I use my Dell's Suspend button the machine locks and 
requires me to remove the batteries to get it back - this worked under 
Feisty.  :)

Also NetworkManager now comes in Xubuntu but still has the same problem 
for me as it has since Edgy.  I can connect to a WPA network.  I can 
connect to a non-encrypted network.  I CANNOT connect to a WEP network. 
  I have to disable roaming mode and instead put in the wireless key 
etc. manually.  This is a pain in the ass and I was really hoping Gutsy 
would fix it finally.

Next week I will be upgrading my fileserver and MythTV box too which 
should be fun.  Then the laptop and the desktop PC will be last as they 
are the ones with the most customization.  Depending on how this thread 
is received I may post some more info on my experience with those boxes. 
  One has a software RAID-5 which should be fun to mess around with.  :) 
  I'd better take some backups first.

Anyone else want to share their Gutsy upgrade stories?

-d