I’m really not sure what to think about this release. There are some interesting initiatives from the projects commercial sponsor, and some other things I haven’t learned about in detail yet. The most significant change appears to be the new branding and themes.

The new branding materials look nice, but I’m struggling with the new theme. The change that appears to have received the most attention is the relocation of the windows controls (close, minimize, maximize). I personally don’t have much issue with the change, but the new controls are very small and thus difficult to hit with the pointer. (The “x” on the close button is also obscured by the light effects, but that’s a minor issue.)

Ubuntu has a new set of colours, the warm brown/orange scheme has been replaced by purple with a bit of orange. The overall colours are very dark and Gnome menus are kind of monochrome. In application windows the menubar and the titlebar are now the same colour which doesn’t appear to change when a window is inactive.

I don’t know how to explain my problem with the new theme colours. If I’m looking at the screen for longer than a few minutes my eyes begin to feel sore, and I can’t quite focus on things. I’m not sure if its contrast (like this bug) or something else. The same colour menu and titlebars do seem to make distinguishing where the menu is much more difficult. The old Ubuntu brown themes were criticized, but I always found them easy on the eyes. Or, as easy as a computer screen will ever be.

I think it might have been something to do with a video card but I’ve never had a lot of luck messing around with anything related to graphics. The system was continually locking up: i.e. display frozen with an unresponsive mouse and keyboard leaving me with one option: hard reset the system. It was really frustrating, and a fresh install from CD (originally I had used the Update Manager) didn’t seem to resolve the issues. I couldn’t find anything in the release notes but I could have missed it.

Anyway, I really need my PC to be working right now, so I was going to revert to 8.10. I didn’t have an 8.10 install CD available so I downloaded the current 8.04 ISO and made a new CD from that. I moved my PC to another location where I could use a faster Internet connection and other computers to burn the CDs and got 8.04 up and running. At the other location, I had statically configured the network IP address via Network Manager. For reasons I don’t understand very well that appears to have cause a broken Network Manager once I had completed the upgrade to 8.10. The network connection worked but Network Manager had no defined connections (“No valid active connections found!”) and would not take over management when I defined one through the applet.

I found some threads on the Ubuntu Forums but still wasn’t getting anywhere. I also found this bug in Launchpad. I’m comfortable with Linux but not an expert by any means so it took me a while to resolve the issue. In the end I commented out any reference to eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces, purged Network Manager (apt-get purge network-manager), and rebooted my computer. Then I reinstalled network-manager and rebooted again. Might not be exactly the right procedure but it seemed to work. Just making changes to the configuration files and logging off and back on didn’t work. Doing that caused other problems like not being able to launch the Terminal app.

The whole process was made more frustrating because now I have to reinstall and reconfigure many of the bits and pieces of my working environment (apache, vmware, etc). I also accidentally deleted my archive of podcasts and downloads somewhere along the line. Obviously, that’s not all the result of trying to install Jaunty but it does more or less guarantee I won’t be trying the upgrade again.

I installed nspluginwrapper using alien as described at MozDev.org (making sure that linux32 was already installed via Synaptic). I downloaded the Flash 9 installer and put the enclosed libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/browser-plugins. And, again as described at MozDev.org, I ran nspluginwrapper with that file.

The Firefox about:plugins page indicated that the Flash 9 plugin was loaded. However, when I tested it on a site with Flash (in this particular case it was MPtv) the movies played fine but there was no sound. I wasn’t sure why that was because Flash 9 uses ALSA and so does Ubuntu.

I searched around on the web a bit, but didn’t find any solutions that really fit my problem (or were within my level of expertise). I decided to look in Synaptic to see if maybe I didn’t have all of the ALSA packages installed. This led me to the lib32asound2 package which is labelled as a 32bit version of the ALSA library. Once that was installed the Flash sound worked perfectly fine.

So now I’m able to properly waste time with YouTube and its many siblings.

At one point I even managed to lose my entire desktop, i.e. when I booted up there was no pretty login screen only the command line. I’m not entirely sure how I did that, but I think it must have been something I did in Synaptic. That freaked me out more than a little bit, but fortunately I thought to run apt-get install ubuntu-desktop which installed a lot of stuff I didn’t recall removing. After that I was able to login into Gnome, but I still didn’t have any sound.

Yesterday, I decided to take another stab at it. I started with the Volume Control window. I already had the main playback volume at the maximum level (it was the first thing I checked when my sound stopped working). But, this time I decided to fiddle with the other sliders to see if anything happened. I launched an MP3 in Totem, and started fiddling with sliders. The first slider I tried was PCM on the capture tab and suddenly I had sound. I still don’t quite understand the relationship there, but I’ve got sound again so I’m not complaining too loud.

I had a little trouble getting the network working again apparently due to the way I had configured things. When I installed Ubuntu 4.10 I was unable to set up the onboard network adaptor from my motherboard and so I had installed a separate adaptor card. Now with 5.04 the onboard adaptor is working just fine. However, this caused a problem with the way my gateway router is set up.

I’ve reserved IP addresses for all my computers based on the hardware address. But, now that my Ubuntu computer has a different adaptor the gateway DHCP server assigned it a different IP address. It took me a few tries, but eventually I got around to updating the settings on my gateway and I was again able to connect to the Internet. Given that I’m still a wee bit fuzzy on the details I may have missed the real problem (obviously I’m a considerable distance from being an expert). But, my computer is working well again so I’m happy. In the future I’ll have to be more careful about trying to change the configuration.

Obviously since it’s Linux, there are a couple things possible on Windows that I can’t do with Ubuntu. There are only two that really matter to me: Flash and QuickTime. However, I also have available an older computer running Windows XP. I use it primarily for running the CorelDraw Graphics Suite. (I’m sure I could have replaced that with Linux software like The Gimp, but I find I’m more comfortable with the Corel interface.)

The one significant problem that I have with Ubuntu appears to have surfaced only after I upgraded to Hoary Hedgehog. For some reason that I don’t understand the folder opening behaviour in the File Manager changed. Now, when I open a folder from within another folder it opens in a completely new window that isn’t in focus. I have to click the button on the task panel to see it, and switching windows with the task pane is slow. (And, as I’ll explain below, switching with Alt-Tab is also slow.)

Unfortunately, I don’t recall any problems before I upgraded so I can’t even remember how this procedure worked in 4.10. I’m not really concerned about whether the opened folders are in the same window or new ones, but having to always switch windows is frustrating.

Another problem I have is that at some point I did something to the window manager and I have no idea how to change it back. I tried to install a version of the window manager that had a feature that shows mini-versions of all the current windows on Alt-Tab instead of the usual switcher. If I recall correctly, this version was called Exposity. I don’t mind it that except that it seems to be a lot slower than it was before. Fortunately, at the moment I often need to do a lot of window switching.

The biggest difficulty for me is that I don’t know very much about administering Linux systems and don’t have the time to really learn it properly. I know enough to use the system fairly effectively, but not nearly enough to fix problems. And especially not the one’s I cause.