Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

My little laptop now is becoming my experimental zone for Linux.  This past week I managed to upgrade it to 8.04.  Had some initial issues, a few repository problems where I switched my location to the US.  That obviously made my downloads a little slower, but I was getting some issues with the JP repositories.  When doing version upgrades, I tend to use the Gnome Package Manager as opposed to KDE's Adept.  I've had some issues with upgrades in the past with Adept.  However, Gnome's Package Manager seems to handle my upgrades without any issues.

Outside of some initial slowness, the upgrade went SMOOTH.  In the past, I painfully would burn a completely new installation CD for my Fedora upgrades because I just didn't trust the package managers bundled with Fedora, leaving my system to out-of-date for significant periods of time.  However, between 7.04 until the current version, I've had no major issues (at least with my laptop) with regards to the upgrades.  Usually, you should wait about 2-3 months for the bugs to be ironed out before doing a full upgrade.  But my laptop posed no risk and I made a go.

At least for now, I don't see much difference visually.  The biggest three areas of immediate impact to me are:

• Lack of Multi-Gnome-Terminal support (we'll get to this one).
• A Beta version of the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release.
• XMMS moving a full version up to 2.

The lack of multi-gnome-terminal was a bummer for me.  You have to do a fair amount of tweaking because the packages are old.  It's not hard to get working, just grab the deb files and some of the unsupported repositories, and you should be fine.  There was one part of the upgrade process where the upgrade program mentions, "Remove These Packages?"  I hit "Yes" intuitively not bothering to read the details and then realizing what it was doing.  Should've left them but I don't know if things like MGT would be disabled (btw, multi-gnome-terminal is great, but the package is practically unsupported and hasn't had an update for a good period; sad).

Firefox 3.0 as a beta is something rather debatable as something to be included in such a major distribution release.  Some of my best plugins are currently disabled as a result (Del.icio.us, colorzilla, Tabs Mix Plus, Restart Firefox).  They aren't complete killers and I can always install a local version, but it defeats the purpose of moving up a full version.  Still, the fact that Firefox 3.0 still is in beta makes me wonder about the decision to move forward.

Next, apparently XMMS is now XMMS 2.  XMMS is similar to the Winamp, except that it feels lighter and isn't run by a visionless company who decided to kill it off.  I'm still waiting to give it a try, so we'll see about that soon.

There were a few other upgrades in the package that I haven't looked at, most notably Open Office.  The other major packages that affect me seem like only minor security patches (e.g. Apache, PHP, Perl, etc.).  Cosmetically, there's not a lot of difference that I can say would make a huge impact upon my work with this version upgrade.  I use the Kubuntu version and there really isn't anything to write home about with the latest 3.5.4 packages.  Once KDE manages to move towards 4 and (K)ubuntu does the full upgrade, I think it'll be worth upgrading.  If you're just looking for some simple eye candy though, don't do the upgrade just for that.

Overall, I think using my laptop as a testbed for the upgrade was a great idea.  There's no critical dependencies upon it for me at the moment since my desktop has become my chief work station.  My desktop, on the other hand, is something I'm holding off on for a little while.  I had some issues with the nvidia driver when I first tried to install it.  Not sure if it'll happen again, but I want to make sure my secondary (laptop) system is okay so I can use it as a backup when I go for the major upgrade to my desktop.  Also, some of those elements that I'm missing were a bit painful.  Luckily, I managed to get a few working, but it looks like I'll have to bite my tongue while waiting for those Firefox plugin authors to finish up.

At work, I'm currently trying to upgrade my system to 7.10.  It was taking far too long so I'm praying by the time I get in tomorrow, the packages should be downloaded and ready to rock.

I've still got a bit of customization to do with my laptop in getting it to mimic my usual desktop environment.  Shouldn't take much work now though.  After that, I need to start importing my application data over.  I'm using a Dell Inspiron 600M with a smaller-than-usual hard disk (only 40 gb as opposed to my original 80 gb which crashed), so I'm a little constrained.  Maybe I'll upgrade that too when I go back to LA this coming weekend :)