Rocking with the Lucid Lynx beta 1
A few days ago the Ubuntu team released the first beta of the next Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) version 10.04, codenamed "Lucid Lynx". Now that the distribution is out of alpha, I thought I would go for it and upgrade. I also took Karmic into use when it hit beta and had little problems.
All you need to do if you're running a desktop version is to fire up the terminal and type:update-manager -d
Update manager should tell you that a new distribution upgrade is available. There are a lot of packages to update (as you can see from the screenshots). It says "close all programs during upgrade", which I didn't do. It might be a good idea since I did run into a few problems which of course could be related to other issues with the beta version also.
Late in the package installation the installer stopped due to issues with gufw which is a Firewall GUI manager. This was easily solved by removing gufw (sudo apt-get remove gufw).
Restarting update manager informed me of a "partial upgrade". This actually happened a few times and for the same packages. Clearly some packages were not going through correctly and this required a bit of cleaning after which update manager didn't want to do the partial upgrade anymore.
After installation problems;
- Nautilus will not open
sftp://locations. This is possibly related to the partial upgrade, so until it is fixed I am using Dolphin to access my sftp locations (like the N900). - The new MeMenu is nowhere to be found. Probably something to do with the partial upgrade. Gwibber, the new social client, is cool though and a nice addition to the default applications.
- My external USB drives did not auto-mount as before after the upgrade, they didn't even show up in Nautilus. After manually mounting them with
mountthey became visible in Nautilus after the next boot. No idea why they went missing but have had no problems with them since.
nautilus-dropbox. It also will not install through the application manager after the upgrade. Installing the Karmic deb file from the Dropbox site directly re-installs the needed packages and Dropbox is back in business, no need to redefine your login details or local Dropbox folder. I suspect nautilus-dropbox will be updated for Lucid before the full release.So, was upgrading worth it? Not if you don't feel adventurous and are not willing to fix a few problems (although there were actually less than I had anticipated). If you do however, go ahead. The problems faced are no showstoppers for home usage.
What has changed? Well the most noticiable change is that boot time has got even faster. Even as it is a beta version! This is due to HAL being removed from the boot process. Also a more controversial change is that the GNOME window manager places the "maximize minimize close" buttons to the left, instead of to the right as before. This takes some time getting used to and after a few hours I decided to use Ubuntu Tweak to move the buttons back to the right. Windows are easier to resize than before. A lot of small visual changes and Nautilus is definately better (with multi-pane support built in). There are more not instantly noticiable changes, check them out from the official Lucid Lynx beta 1 page. Even though it is beta I've not had a single application crash yet.
Apart from the few small problems, which I'm confident will soon be fixed, Lucid Lynx is running great, fast and looking good.
Comments (post a comment)