As promised I managed to snag the update to Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Beta yesterday. The first thing I noticed, even as I was taking the update, is that the estimated time for the update was 3 and a quarter hours. Holy crap! I’ve never seen an Ubuntu update take that bloody long. EVAH. Of course one of the possible causes could be that I have so many damned apps installed, but somehow I’m not sure that’s the issue. (Although yes, I did go through and clean out some of the crap.)
Once I finally got to the reboot stage I noticed an error message about something crashing during the update. I didn’t notice what it was, but I get the feeling it’s in relation to Bug #356157 in hotkey-setup (Ubuntu): “package hotkey-setup 0.1-23ubuntu10 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2”. It seems everyone is getting bitten by this bug, and even though an update came down the pipeline to fix it, I couldn’t apply the update yet. Sergios was kind enough to post very specific instructions that fixed the issue for me. In short, get to a terminal window and run this command
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup
When the file opens go down to around line 46. You should see
# This entire block does nothing on desktops right now
if laptop-detect; then
do_video
;;
restart|force-reload)
$0 stop || true
$0 start
;;
esac
exit 0
What you want to do is to add a line below where it says do_video so it will now read like this:
# This entire block does nothing on desktops right now
if laptop-detect; then
do_video
fi
;;
restart|force-reload)
$0 stop || true
$0 start
;;
esac
Save the file, and then apply the update with sudo apt-get upgrade. Your problem will be solved.
I ended up with problems trying to get Avant Window Navigator (AWN) reinstalled, but that’s because I’m running the trunk packages and one of the first thing the update process does is to disable any and all third-party repositories like the Launchpad PPA’s. I went through and verified which of my PPA’s have Jaunty packages available (I have about 40 PPA’s that I’ve used from time to time and had to see if they could be enabled for 9.04 Beta) and was finally able to get my AWN back working (for the most part).
I’ve seen some really short boot times, but I just did fired up my comp (from being completely off) and from selecting the specific GRUB entry to being able to do anything on my system (with autologon) took me about two minutes. That may not be the start/end events that others are using but I’m not seeing a noticeable change in the startup time on my system. I’m also seeing that I’m still getting issues of Compiz not getting started properly so I get a nice message from AWN that it can’t see any compositing. I’m definitely going to have to try to sit down one day and spend some time in an exhaustive search for what could be causing the problem because it really bugs the living daylights out of me. What I end up having to do for now is to go to my Compiz Fusion Icon and make either reloading the window manager or manually selecting Compiz as the Window Manager, which seems to “hang” my system while Compiz does it’s thing. In the process of doing all that I have to kill my Google Gadgets Sidebar and restart it once I get Compiz running properly, which is just one more pain in the rear that I have to get resolved. I know I probably have a faulty profile and I need to create a new profile to try to get things cleaned up but I really don’t feel like going through that hassle, plus I seem to have filled up most of my partitions so I’ll need to see what I can do to clear out some space to make a new profile.
There’s a new icon on my panel for the Indicator Applet, and I’m honestly not sure if it’s useful or not. At the moment it’s showing an envelope to let me know that Evolution has a new message, and I have a feeling it’s going to stay there until I mark all of my email read, which I don’t do that often since I tend to use the unread flag to help me see the messages and articles I want to blog about or use in some other way at a later date.
One of the nice things I’m seeing is that there’s now a fade transition when Wallpaper Tray changes my desktop wallpaper. I’m not sure what’s generating the transition effect but it’s pretty nice.
During my first reboot after the update (while I was still making sure I had all my apps updated properly) I didn’t have any sound, not even the Test sound from the Sound Preferences window, but once I got all of my Gstreamer codecs updated properly and logged out I was able to hear sounds from my comp again.
If you’re like me you use the Sessions window pretty often. It’s been renamed so typing “Sess” into Gnome Do won’t do any good anymore. It’s now called System > Preferences > Startup Applications.
Speaking of Gnome Do, I’m finding that when I use the hotkeys to call up GNOME Do 0.8.1.3 it wants to come up behind whatever window I have active unless I make the desktop the active “application”. Of course now when I try to use the hotkeys it doesn’t do that, even with calling up Do when I’ve got the cursor in Epiphany, so I’m not sure if I just needed to to do a reboot or what. I’m also noticing that I’m not seeing the Nouveau theme, even though it’s my selected theme in the Do Preferences dialog.
There’s also a very nice new feature in Synaptic. Now when you select a package you’ll see a button labeled “Get Screenshot”. When you click the button it will grab a screenshot for the application (if one’s available). They’re rather on the small side, and I haven’t seen a way to enlarge them, but it’s nice to be able to see a screenie of an app.
I seem to be having an issue with Sonata and the Music Player Daemon itself. For some reason MPD isn’t seeing any music it can play. It’s probably a change in the configuration but I didn’t keep my old config settings when the update came in. I’ll play around with it some more later on but I already miss my Sonata. 
I honestly haven’t had much chance to play with the update yet, mostly because the update itself took so bloody long plus I wasted a lot of time trying to chase down the sound issue before I relogged. I strongly recommend that you snag the Ubuntu 9.04 beta iso and either burn yourself a LiveCD or put it on a flash drive and check it with that before you take it, especially while it’s still in beta. Plus make sure you backup your important files before doing any major upgrades like this. The Ubuntu 9.04 beta is for testing purposes only and shouldn’t be used on a production system (the computer you use on a daily basis). There are still some things being fixed and the members of the Ubuntu community can not be held responsible for any data loss that arises from upgrading your daily system to this beta.
Otherwise, what I’ve seen so far looks pretty good. I can’t wait to play with it more and see all of the changes and improvements the dev teams have made. :p Now if we could only get a useful spell checker in Epiphany I’d be even happier.
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