Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut

Even though I said I'd wait a month, or two or more, before upgrading my main laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, I got in early enough today and had a fast enough connection to my chosen mirror that I decided to do the upgrade to Karmic today. Now. The download was quick, and I've as of now got about 45 minutes left for the installation to complete.

This is an upgrade, not a clean install, so I won't be getting (and don't really want) the new GRUB 2 bootloader. I won't get the ext4 filesystem, either (although I would like to try it, I'm not sufficiently motivated at present to do a full reinstall).

I'm fairly confident that all of my hardware — a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and any one of three WiFi adapters — will work.

I'm less confident about the laptop's Intel video. Intel video hasn't just been problematic in Linux for the past couple of years. It's been a problem in the BSDs, too.

It all comes down to Xorg. Or Intel. Depends on who you ask. Or whom you ask.

However you slice it up, upgrades have been hell for anybody with Intel video chips in their computers. And that's a whole lot of people. I can think of bigger "negatives" when it comes to open-source-OS adoption over the past two years ... oh, wait ... I can't.

My basic contention is that video needs to just work. Messing about with xorg.conf should be a last, last, last resort, and if such messing is required, there should be extremely clear and easy-to-find guides on exactly what to put in said xorg.conf file to make the system work.

Then there's the whole switch from EXA to UXA acceleration (like I have even the smallest clue as to what that really means).

But I'm ready enough for X problems. I've posted a few entries of my own on how to clean up Intel video first with EXA and now with UXA acceleration. I applauded the whole idea of running perfect video with absolutely no xorg.conf file for the few months I was able to do it. I hope we get back there.

Anyhow, while you can see that Intel video has dominated my thoughts about the move from 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 (Hardy), but there's more.

I ran the current long-term-support release of Ubuntu, 8.04 (Hardy) for a whole lot longer than I had planned. It ran very well.

But once I made the less-than-painless upgrade through Intrepid (8.10) to Jaunty (9.04) in a single, longish day (and after I finally got the new-to-8.10 NetworkManager to behave — and behave well, I might add), I suddenly had a Ubuntu Linux system with a whole lot more stability than before.

Here's the short version: 9.04 is better than 8.04 on my hardware.

So with all the talk of faster booting and better performance under Karmic (9.10), coupled with more than a couple of clues on how to fix Xorg video if and when it breaks), I was a bit anxious about the upgrade.

And after using the utility in System -- Administration -- Software Sources to find a faster mirror, I was ready for the big download and installation.

I've been doing Linux and BSD installs somewhat regularly since the beginning of 2007, and I'm still a bit worried about some of the things that come up in a Ubuntu upgrade. "Some packages are deprecated and will be removed" (I'm paraphrasing here) ... um ... OK. I can handle that. "Some extra software repositories are being disabled ... re-enable them after the upgrade" ... I dealt with this in the Hardy-Intrepid-Jaunty upgrade, so I remember it. I don't like it, but I remember it.

Then I got the dialog box about replacing the NetworkManager config file. That's the one I had to modify to get Intrepid/Jaunty working after the Hardy upgrade, which I did over wireless, leaving me with a non-managed wired Ethernet port until I figured out how to re-manage it.

Knowing that some or all of my NetworkManager configuration either might or definitely will be blown away by an upgrade? Not the best feeling.

Anyhow, with Karmic, I'll be getting Firefox 3.5 — yes, Ubuntu stuck with 3.0.x for the duration of the Jaunty release. I know I could've gotten 3.5 with a PPA, but I'm not in the habit of grabbing newer versions of things that are already in the distribution, so I kept Firefox 3.0.x around for the duration. There'll be updates on just about everything else, from OpenOffice to digiKam (my current "focus," so to speak) as well as the entire GNOME desktop.

As always, I hope for minimal regression and maximal improvement. I got that going from Hardy to Jaunty. I hope for more of the same as I go from Jaunty to Karmic.

Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10: An opera in three acts:

• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 3: Bringing X back from the dead (and why, oh why didn't the installer just do this for me?)