After a recent jump from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04, I needed at least three days to settle down after having a lot of hiccups with the latest and greatest versions.
The major problem was with my ATI drivers. Never a good thing to mix ATI with Linux, I have learnt. But maybe the lesson came a bit too late as my Motherboard I bought a year ago has got the RadeonExpress 1250 onboard graphic card which is already in “Legacy” mode!
The downside is that the newest generation of the driver doesn’t support any of the “older” ATI chipsets, which at this point include the R300 through R500 chipsets.
The proprietary ATI fglrx driver won’t support the new kernel. Need to make do with the open source drivers. Fortunately, they are a good fit for 2D graphics with a good resolution. Bye bye, Compiz, for the time being.
Having settled with the “basic” look and feel, I also find some problems cropping up in the package repositories. A guide for installing the good old Tomcat server makes a pretty frank statement before proceeding with the installation procedure:
If you are running Ubuntu and want to use the Tomcat servlet container, you should not use the version from the repositories as it just doesn’t work correctly. Instead you’ll need to use the manual installation process that I’m outlining here.
This is probably not unique to Jaunty, but nonetheless, the general trend now is that I do read a bit online before installing anything from the repository. Be it Amarok, the version 2 of which isn’t very well received, or Tomcat, or Eclipse.
Wine, which was working wonderfully in Hardy, seems to be broken for some reason in Jaunty. All I get is 2 seconds of screen flicker, whenever I try to load any program. Need to google on this a bit more in detail. But a quick search points in the direction of my graphics card (again!).
I am left wondering why I upgraded at all. Maybe it was the faith that with Ubuntu, newer version numbers always mean more happiness.
It’s not that Ubuntu has let us down. Although a lot of posts are floating about regarding Ubuntu pre-release testing being inadequate, there is actually too much on the plate to test with. A multitude of hardware chips, file systems, desktop environments, applications, each with their different versions, is a pretty daunting task. I just hope that every once in a while there is a release in which the dev folks take a step back and look at how usable the OS is, and whether it “Just Works”