Este artículo está en inglés porque voy a enviárselo a algunos desarrolladores de Ubuntu, a modo de feedback. No voy a traducirlo porque me da palo. Google puede traducirlo para vosotros, aunque sea una auténtica kk

I’ll try to explain my experience on updating Ubuntu 4.10 Warty to 5.04 Hoary. I’ve been a Debian user for some years, and updated the system at least twice (Woody -> Sarge -> Sid) with apt-get dist-upgrade. I had some problems, but managed to solve them.

I followed exactly the Hoary release notes with Synaptic. At some points I had to open a terminal and dpkg -i –force-overwrite some packages, because I use checkinstall to install my compiled-from-source packages. I hopefully suppose that, on a fresh Warty installation, this is not needed

As the article is long and has some screenshots, I don’t want to flood the homepage. Please click on “leer más (read more) to read on…

the best

As I said before, previous experience on installing and updating Debians made me a tough man with the console and dpkg. The –force-overwrite argument saved my day, because it allowed me to overwrite some packages which failed to update with synaptic.

By the way, I really love the update manager, the add and remove programs and the new synaptic. Good work, man!

add or remove programs
Click to enlarge

Please remember to uninstall portmap and xfree86, because it will be replaced with x.org. Also it is recommended to apt-get install ubuntu-base ubuntu-desktop to make sure that you have the base packages. After the upgrade, it is safe to remove some of them if they’re not useful for you (i.e. portmap, mutt…)

Remember to reboot completely your computer after all packages have been upgraded. Don’t touch anything until it has restarted. There’s a new kernel, new X window system and new desktop environment. It is easy to break something if you run some programs before restarting

Now for some niceties that positively surprised me. Take a look at the Gnome 2.10 release notes to have more information:

  • Firefox now supports Gtk+2.8 file selector. Just install the package mozilla-firefox-gnome-support
  • Windows that are in background now don’t steal your focus. If you’re chatting with somebody on gaim, opening a firefox doesn’t automatically focus it, but the window appears at the background and your typing is shown on gaim, not the new program
  • The new default theme. It’s gorgeous! (Click on any screenshot to see it)

the rest

Life isn’t always pink. I noticed some oddities after the upgrade.

  • MIME .wmv bug hasn’t been solved. It’s really annoying!
  • The mixer applet died. Well, it’s alife but hidden. The process is running but it doesn’t show in the panel. I suppose I’ll find some way to solve this, but not until now
  • Evolution has some untranslated strings. Strange, because it’s supposed to be fully translated
  • Now I have to replace all packages that I installed with checkinstall into their new versions. I blame myself, not Ubuntu’s team, but hey, just to let everybody know it.
  • Nautilus window dance isn’t user-friendly. In fact, it breaks Gnome’s HIG. The windows appear randomly through the screen. Well, not really random, but that’s the effect for the user. Changed to normal mode immediately.

The menus. What’s up with the menus? All my personal shortcuts disappeared. I know that now we’re following freedesktop.org specs, but would have it been very difficult to, at least, preserve user’s shortcuts?. Not to say that now it’s virtually impossible to fix this. You have to manually edit the files in /usr/share/applications. No way. Personally, I wouldn’t have made the change to freedesktop until some official menu editor were released. And gnome-menu-editor doesn’t even compile

Please, think on the users. This has surprised me a lot, because Gnome’s usability is growing exponentially, much better than KDE’s. Now what do we do to edit the menus?

There also appeared a debian menu with some apps. Sorry, but it must disappear. Just followed this instructions and deleted /etc/xdg/menus/debian-menu.menu

Well, at least we don’t have to bother with applications that install but don’t show in the menu. This was a real pain in previous GNOMEs, but I don’t know it the medicine is worse than the illness…

the rare

Oh, there’s more.

We all know that pixies exist. They live in the eter, and Murphy leads them. Sometimes they appear and fuck your life. And they appeared after my upgrade

Some whatsoever weird thing changed my fonts. I blame x.org, but I’m not sure. I always used “sans” (bitstream vera sans) for all apps, and I was really happy with this font. But after the restart, the fonts had changed a little and now look bigger, but they’re still sans! For example, the bold headings for the preferences windows now look dizzy. I have tried to change all options on the gnome-font-properties, but no luck. When I use google, the result’s abstract is unaliased, because the font size is small. It looks horrible.

I’m getting used to it, but it isn’t as prettier as it was. Please, if you find any way to fix this, contact me or leave a comment. I’ve been googling for two days and didn’t found anything useful.

conclusions

Okay, Murphy changed my sans font and the menus aren’t editable. But hey, it isn’t so bad.

GNOME’s accessories, like gedit, have beed improved a lot. Now I’m able to use great programs like evince and beagle.

Most of the annoyances of the previous versions have been solved. The update notifier is just perfect. Synaptic is even better. Now we can use search-as-you-type on the file selector, which, by the way, is now used by 90% of the software.

In general, the transition to 2.10 has pleased me. And I know that a fresh install of Hoary would have solved most of the problems. The installer recongnises more hardware than Warty’s, and it is easier to use. But I can’t reinstall every 6 months, that’s why apt-get is for.

So, to sum up: The GNOME team and the Ubuntu team have done a great job. And as I know that they listen to the users, I have written this article as feedback for them. I even wrote it in English, where my blog is Spanish, so that everybody can understand it. Thanks for reading.

Update 4/12: There’s some strange Nautilus bug that crashes the file manager when right-clicking on a mp3 file and selecting “properties”. It has been reported, at least, on redhat , ubuntu forums and gentoo.