So Kubuntu Dapper came out last week, and I thought I would try to upgrade. Last time went moderately well, and the same again this time – only moderately well. Still, four problems for an operating system upgrade (and in the linux world, that’s every single application as well) isn’t too bad.

Here, for reference, are what happened to me, and how I fixed them.

Changing releases in Adept – In Breezy, you can change all the “Breezy” entries to “Dapper” graphically – but you need to press enter, not just click out of the fields, for it to stick. Still, first time I haven’t got down and dirty with a text editor to sort out /etc/apt/sources.list . However, given that people upgrade to a new release every six months, I’d have thought there’d be a button for it (“New release available!!!!1! or similar)

After downloading and installing all the new packages (with a couple of barfs along the way in packages from Universe), I rebooted, to find that it bailed at around the time when X should be firing up. Many years of nVidia card troubles pointed me in the right direction – two nVidia packages conflict. Apparently nvidia-glx conflicts with nvidia-settings on purpose nowadays, but it would make more sense if nvidia-settings had been removed by the upgrade process. And that’s the fix – remove both packages, and just reinstall nvidia-glx. (Oh, and browsing the web in a non-graphical browser sucks ass, still.)

When I started amaroK, all the songs finished instantly and it rapidly ended up at the end of the playlist. After a false start I eventually found the problem – mp3 playing for xine is now in a different package. But this is in the Multiverse, which I had never needed (multiverse = unsupported proprietry software) – and it seems strange that it’s not at least in Restricted ( = supported proprietry software), since mp3 playing is pretty routine. I’d imagine all the hardcore testers had all four repositories (main and universe are the others) enabled, and so didn’t spot this…

An unsolved problem is that something resets the master wave volume to zero every time I log on. the workaround is to use alsamixer to sort it out. The last version of Mandrake I used (back when it was called Mandrake!) had a similar problem for the surround sound, but I can’t remember if/how I fixed it.

And finally, when using firefox, every 30 seconds or so it would lock up for 5 seconds, blank the page, and then refresh with it set back to the top. Very, very annoying, but it’s a bug with the way that the gtk theming works for kde. Going to kcontrol and setting gtk apps to use a gtk theme sorts it out. (Launching firefox from a console gives lots of gtkpixbuf assertions, which is what gives it away). clues here, probably these bugs are the same problem: 46547, 48314.

All in all, an A- for the upgrade process. I would still prefer to upgrade a linux system rather than a windows system any day of the week (and that’s even bearing in mind I upgrade windows every day of the week, so I’m pretty au fait with it!)