Last night I upgraded my home PC from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. On the one hand, the upgrade went better than any other upgrade ever has. On the other, I ran into some major problems.
Good
- The actual upgrade process completed without errors.
- The computer was successfully upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 without any manual intervention on my part.
- Desktop effects (aka compiz) are very fun. I’d tried them in the past with less than stellar results (too buggy) but they seem much more stable now.
- The extra buttons on my trackball finally work righ with Firefox under Ubuntu (back/forward).
Bad
- The upgrader removed and did not reinstall the restricted kernel modules.
- For my less technical readers, basically the upgrade broke both my wireless connection and 3D acceleration. I could live without the 3D, but this computer relies on wireless to connect to my home network. Fixing that took a couple of hours of digging around in the log files and using another computer to get the files I needed. Major headache.
- I understand why the modules were removed and not installed after the upgrade, but I wish the upgrader had been smart enough to realize I needed them and would have at least downloaded them to be available after I rebooted to complete the install.
- KDE 4.x is the new default desktop environment for Kubuntu. KDE 4.x does not play nicely with Nvidia graphics cards. Like the one in my computer. Meaning the lag between clicking on a the K menu and the menu popping up was about 2 minutes. *ugh* I could disable the Nvidia drivers to get normal performance back but then I’d lose my 3D acceleration. *sigh* So I’ve switched over to using Gnome, which will probably make at least one person I know very smug.
- The network shared drives I had setup to be automatically mounted on every boot are no longer mounting. Gnome has an easy way to connect to those shares, but I really don’t want to have to mount them manually every time.
Update: For those of you stopping by looking for instructions on how to do this upgrade, you can fine the complete instructions (with screenshots!) over at Ubuntu’s Community Documentation page for IntrepidUpgrades/Kubuntu.