wahlau's online hut

eventhough the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon was release on thursday, 18th October, i only manage to install it yesterday because i was on a business trip. Well, rule number 1: never try to change a working and running system while you are on important routine/work. So the choice was to do it when i am back home on Friday. To be more efficient, i started the download at home remotely, so that i can straight away start with the installation once i am home.

this round i choose not to upgrade from feisty. Reason - i have so far only upgraded the system since breezy, perhaps. And i realise i have quite some junks around my system. So it is perhaps time to tidy things up, and start optimizing the system. Doing this is not really difficult nor dangerous - you only need to know things how they exactly work. So i did the normal process - backed up important data, checked whether is there anything i forget in my root directory, and moved them to my /home and 3rd partition. Oh yeah, i have a dedicated /home partition so that i only need to reuse it when i wish to reinstall - usually it will just work with my older configuration. You should do this so that upgrade or reinstallation works magically without long hours of reconfiguration.

The installation was easy and fast. On the thinkpad t43 i think generally it only took around 30 minutes, including booting the live CD up and making some selections right. Once done, a reboot brought me immediately to a just-work(tm) system - i don't need to tweak anything at all! Well done Ubuntu... Even the support for the Samsung 225BW LCD worked right away without 915resolution... i think it is integrated or supported now. WiFi worked next as soon as i keyed in the encryption keys, and i was ready to make customizations.

I've decided to make some changes instead of reusing all my old configs. I installed some of my must-have softwares - Claws-Mail, Skype, Liferea, Gimmie, Java, Eclipse and  VLC. Apt-get was good in helping me. The command does all the work for me, and i got things up rather quickly. Next was to transfer some old the configuration and data of the must-have softwares. Most of them are a matter of transfering from the old home directory to the new ones. For Pidgin, i only moved my old data from .gaim to .pidgin, and i have everything back except some minor configuration features. not bad, and Pidgin does look good :) Claws-Mail migration is not difficult too, and i think i have idea now how to synchronize between 2 claws clients. Time to get Unison up and i should be able to perhaps synchronization as wished. Even getting pptp supported was as easy as "sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp". Neat :)

Generally Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon is a great improvement when compared older released. I can see slight speed increase, and many software glitches are kind of removed or corrected now. The inclusion of Compiz is not really an excitement for me, and i realise i have problem maximizing software when Compiz/Visual Effect is activated. Shall check out bugzilla or google when i have time. Else others works better and nicer. I have also got a kubuntu iso lying, and perhaps later i will test it out with qemu so that i can see how well is the KDE counterpart today.

There are still some tweaks left to be done in the next week, but til then i have now a working system in less than a day. Not too bad since reinstallation sometimes can give more headache and heart attacks than you can imagine. Now i only hope i will not get a shock realizing i have removed some important data... i manage to accidentally removed 4 days sent mails while migrating Claws-mail data ;) perhaps was low on Coffee this morning ;)

til then, enjoy Gutsy...