Jaunty beta upgrade

[Liam Proven]

Well, I upgraded my Thinkpad X31 over the weekend from 8.10 to the
beta of 9.04. It mostly went pretty smoothly, but I hit a couple of
snags. The installer did not put the new kernel in GRUB's menu.lst
file - I just picked the default option and this was to leave menu.lst
alone. The result was an error on bootup that CPU scaling was not
supported on my processor.

I found the new kernel, manually amended the file, checked it worked,
which it did just fine, and removed the old kernel using Synaptic -
which once again newrote menu.lst and removed my hand-added entries.
It's a very good job I checked before I rebooted. Happily I have a
docking station for this machine with a DVD drive in, so I could have
fixed this by hand, but otherwise, I would have been stranded. I don't
/think/ the machine can boot from USB - I do not own any PC that can,
AFAIK.

Also, 9.04 seems to enable Compiz by default, which is agonizingly
slow on my ATI Rage Mobility chipset. The machine was unable to keep
up with my 2-finger typing and was unpleasant to use. The transparent
notifications from Pidgin and on using my special IBM keys to change
volume or screen brightness looked great in Compiz. Now I have
disabled it, performance is sluggish but usable, but the notifications
appear in an ugly black box overlaid on the top-right corner of the
screen.

What app produces these notifications, does anyone know? I'd like to
investigate its settings and see if it can do its own alpha-blending,
and if not, just turn it off...

Anyone reckon these things are worth filing as bugs?

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508