My upgrade to Gutsy

It's about a week before the release of K/Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. So, I decided that it was okay now for me to upgrade. But since the upgrade involved downloading about 1Gb of software from the Internet, I decided to do it in the department. I was headed in to work on my TA work anyway, today. So, I thought I'd just upgrade it at the same time.

Firstly, it was not trivial to set up my laptop in the department network. It's not just your average plug-n-pray. It involved a little skulduggery. But, I managed to get it all working in the end and proceeded to perform the upgrade. It took about 30-45 minutes to get it all done. Then I rebooted my computer and prayed. Miraculously, it started up.

It was then, that I got a visit from one of the staff members. I was asked "how" I had managed to gain access to the network. I just told him that I had "plugged my laptop in directly". I was then told that I am not allowed to use the departmental network for my personal stuff. Since I was already done with the upgrade, I decided not to argue the point and just proceeded to unplug my computer and move off.

Then, I came home and checked to make sure that everything was working. The first problem that I ran into was a problem with KDE PIM. For some reason, it wasn't using my saved contacts, calendar or tasks. A quick google came up with the solution to the problem. A setting was missing from the configuration file, which I manually added in. The second problem is that my laptop will now hang (or seem to hang) when I suspend it. This is a curious problem as it implies a problem with the kernel. However, it's using the same kernel version that I've been using for the last few months. It's a known bug and has been reported. I'll need to recompile my custom kernel to have it all working.

All in all, I have to commend the K/Ubuntu people for doing a great job of things. Hopefully, they'll sort out the different problems before the final release next week. I look forward to using the new version. I'm also looking forward to the new 8.42 ATI drivers due out by the end of this month. It's supposed to have the performance of the previous drivers, but with various bug fixes. My computer sometimes hangs when I use the new drivers due to graphics corruption.