I didn’t do one of these for 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, I was a little worried to find not one but two links to my Hardy (8.04 LTS) beta writeup as reasons to be exceptionally cautious about upgrading. I discovered I did not want to be an influential commentator on Ubuntu, even for trivial values of influential.
However, I should note in the interests of fairness that both Intrepid and Jaunty have been vastly better experiences. Specifically, things that seem to remain reliably working across upgrades for me without requiring reconfiguration now include suspend and resume, sound, wireless and external monitors. I have not found Jaunty less stable than Intrepid and both are fine for my terminal+mutt+Firefox+LaTeX+Python+Pidgin use.
Fixed in Jaunty:
- Using my Bluetooth dongle to connect to my phone. And Andrew’s. He can update his ringtone! We don’t have to write our shopping lists long-hand. Amazing.
Still broken in Jaunty:
- gnome-typing-monitor still doesn’t regard being suspended or hibernated as a typing break. This one is one of those bugs that gets triaged as ‘Low’, never gets fixed, and drives me completely insane, There is nothing like starting up to get some work done and immediately being locked out for a typing break. It’s bug 122038 against Ubuntu, bug 492662 against Debian and bug 430797 against GNOME. It’s nearing its second birthday. I might throw it a party and then never use gnome-typing-monitor again.
- In both Intrepid and Jaunty I have occasional kernel panics resuming from suspend (I don’t know about hibernate, I use it extremely rarely because my install of Ubuntu 7.10 gave me a swap partition that is too small to hibernate into unless I close all interesting programs, and I haven’t bothered fixing it). I should attempt to file this bug, and I will get around to it any, uh, release now. The main thing stopping me is that it often happens when I resume on a train, which means I don’t have ‘net access, which means keeping copious notes for a later report, which means no report. Besides, I don’t think I’d ever seen a kernel panic before Intrepid. The novelty is wearing off, but only slowly.
Newly broken in Jaunty:
- OpenOffice(!!) on my laptop dies consistently on launch with the warning unable to get gail version number. I have tried and failed to find an existing bug for this: there are a few isolated reports, either marked as fixed or useless conversations that end with
oh never mind, I made a stupid mistake and now I’ve fixed it.
(Dear Internet: always specify how.) There’s bug 350193 but it seems to require pasting some specific data into OO Calc, whereas I don’t even get to the stage of having a window open. OpenOffice works on my university desktop though. I’ve filed bug 365763. - Empathy, generally, although it falls into this category by default since I’ve never tried to use it before. I can’t get it to connect to any instant messaging service at all. I haven’t been motivated to investigate enough to file a bug report, because it doesn’t appear to support what for me is a key feature of Pidgin, namely, ability to have profiles where I connect to some IM accounts but not always all of them. (I also consider having to have several IM accounts in the first place something of a bug. With the universe.)
I don’t know the status of my very annoying bug in Hardy whereby whenever I adjusted the screen brightness downwards via the keyboard, my Ctrl key got virtually ‘stuck’ down. (So, for example, if I pressed ‘w’, a window would close, and ‘d’ would terminate programs.) Daniel Stone even kindly offered to look into this one for me, but shortly afterwards I poured hot chocolate all over my laptop and now the down arrow doesn’t work. I can’t try and reproduce this unless I finally get off my butt and get a new keyboard. And thus do promising bug reports vanish into nothing.
Plus, a bonus tip for people who use rdiff-backup. rdiff-backup is rather fiddly about version numbers, which is not a great attribute in a backup program, since you should be able to backup between two systems that aren’t running exactly the same version of rdiff-backup, Python, Ubuntu or anything else. (Quoth Martin Pool: I use duplicity as a workaround
.) However, if you’re like me and your precious rdiff-backup backup regime took days to set up and you’re not doing it again for a while, Andreas Olsson points out that he maintains a PPA of the latest version of rdiff-backup for all supported versions of Ubuntu except Dapper, which is sufficient for my purposes at the moment.