Going from Ubuntu 8.04 to 9.04

Ciao, lume.

Well I have finally made the upgrade from Hardy Heron, and I've got to say, so far I'm pleased by Jaunty. After a few days of slowly configuring things back to the way I like them (custom keyboard layout, icon themes, etc.), I'm fairly well nestled into the new operating system.

In general, doing a clean install has erased a lot of the little problems that had slowly accumulated over the course of my previous installation which I hadn't figured out how to resolve, such as the inability to correctly display Arabic text in any web browser, or play certain Flash and Java applets.

Additionally, 9.04 just seems to run better. It also has better support for my video card (ATI driver). Actually, for the first time in an Ubuntu installation, a working driver gave me a perfect display with full resolution automatically from the installation without the need to download or activate other drivers. Support for my Broadcom wireless card has been streamlined into the Restricted Hardware Drivers section (I believe this was a feature of 8.10, which I skipped). Compiz still displays with some minor glitches here and there, but now I can display certain things such as screen savers, and run certain programs such as Livestation, without the intense screen flickering I would have in 8.04 without first deactivating Compiz. Also, for the first time in my Ubuntu experience, I am able to suspend and revive my machine successfully, which is a great surprise.

So far, I've only run into two problems, both about sound. The first one isn't such a big deal; I'm just having some occasional conflicts between two applications in Preferences section of the main menu. The "Sounds" application and the "Login Window" application both seem to have options to enable or disable startup/shutdown sounds, and enabling a startup sound in both seems to play it twice, and if I enable it only in the "Login Window" app, then eventually it discovers it's disabled in the "Sounds" app and stops working until I go in and mess with it again. Or maybe I'm imagining things!

The other problem, I probably should mention, is that Ubuntu 9.04 seemed to install without working sound. ALSA thought it was playing sound, most of the time the system didn't detect any problems with the driver; it simply thought it was playing everything fine, but alas, there was but dead silence. The only sounds I heard were in the login window, but I had no audio after logging in. I would occasionally get this message:

audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio device for playback.

I was finally able to get my audio working by following the instructions in this thread and forcing an ALSA update, running the "AlsaUpgrade-1.0.x-rev-1.17" script with option "-id".

One other little problem I had is that as of Ubuntu 9.04, by default, one can no longer use CTRL+ALT+Backspace to restart the X server and revert to the login screen. Easy fix:

sudo apt-get install dontzap
sudo dontzap -d

Finally, I was unable to create working keyboard shortcuts inside the Gnome Configuration Editor until I went in and enabled them in Compiz first, although the disabling may have been trigged by default after installing the Compiz Settings Manager (compizconfig-settings-manager).

All in all, I'm enjoying 9.04 so far, and definitely recommend the upgrade! I haven't really encountered any insurmountable problems, other than that of getting vmware to work again. But that's another story...