[Karmic] Heads up

[NoOp]

Installed 9.10 Alpha 6 Karmic on my test machine today. Following are a
few "heads-up's" that I found during the process.

1. Grub2.

I did a fresh install on a drive that had a previous 9.04 on it. The
drive had been pulled from another test machine that had grub installed
on hd0 & was installed as the slave to an existing WinXP drive in the
machine. Set bios to boot from CD and set the 9.04 drive as the boot
hard drive.

  Used the 9.10 A6 liveCD to install... all went well until reboot. 9.10
was left with a desktop background & had to powerdown the machine to get
it to reboot. When it came up it gave the infamous:

Grub loading Stage1.5
Grub loading, please wait...

(see: http://grub.enbug.org/GrubLegacy)

Tried an old SuperGrub & Knoppix but neither worked as Karmic uses both
Grub2 and ext4. Finally booted back into the 9.10 liveCD & reinstalled.
This time I used the 'Advanced' button in the partition process and told
it to install grub on sdab instead of hd0 & that worked. However, after
booting I then had to so a

$ sudo update-grub

to get the system to recognize my WinXP drive and add it to the menu.
BTW, menue.lst is no more so don't bother looking for it in /boot/grub/
- instead look for the "new & improved" /boot/grub/grub.cfg... oh my how
we've progressed. Don't forget to use:

$ gksu gedit /boot/grub/grub.cfg

to edit it. Or:

$ /boot/grub/grub.cfg

to look at it.

2. GDM screen sucks (IMO) and has a security issue (again IMO) in that
it automatically provides a login screen with choices for usernames.

  This is a security issue as anyone with a stolen system only has to
guess as passwords & need not bother with guessing usernames. Of course
anyone with any common sense could just boot to recovery mode, or use a
liveCD to look at the home directory to see usernames. But, why make it
easier from the start?

  Jaunty gdm login screen is considerably more polished/sexy/whatever.
Karmic login screen reminds me of an Windows login - the only thing it's
missing is the cute little icons next to the username(s).

  It currently isn't possible to change the gdm screen (in any manner
that I know of), and it is not possible to change the username to no
username, see:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/gdm/+bug/395299
[gdm 2.26 has no graphical configuration tool]

3. Applications|Add/Remove has been replaced by "Ubuntu Software Store".
At first I thought this was a commercial link to buy Ubuntu coffee mugs,
shirts, etc. But instead it's the old 'Applications|Add/Remove' revamped
with a 'Get Free Software' theme that you can't change to 'All available
applications', 'All Open Source applications', 'Canonical-maintained
applications', Third party applications', or 'Installed applications
only'. In other words, it's be dumbed down to the choice between
View|All Applications and View|Canonical-Maintained Applications.

4. There is a new "disk" utility called palimpsest that checks your
drives for errors. Unfortunately there are issues...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/413673
[Palimpsest disk utility is annoying]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=506254
[Palimpsest reports bad sectors on a good disk]
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-220231.html
[Palimpsest Disk Utility (SMART errors)]
etc., etc., etc.

  This "utility" shows bad sectors on both of my old hard drives yet
gives no details of of the problem(s). Simple fsck on the drive that
9.10 messed up on the first install resolved the "issues"...
miraculously on both the Windows NTSF drive *and* the ext4 drive.

Anyway, that's as far as I've gotten today. Who is it that has the "it's
only a hobby" sig? It's certainly appropriate (again IMO) in Karmic's case.