Hello Karmic Koala!

Finally, I did it! I just upgraded my corporate laptop with the latest release of Ubuntu (9.10) aka “Karmic Koala”. Available for a few weeks, I preferred to wait for some holidays before the upgrade. First, because without laptop, I can’t work! In case of big issue, my off-days would be helpful to restore to a safe environment without (too much) stress. Second, it’s always best to watch for the early-adopters feedback. “Let the others face the issues” is a good philosophy 😉

Honestly, a good job was performed by the Ubuntu developers. After a backup of my data, the upgrade went smoothly using the GUI. Of course, some configuration files from the previous version were manually adapted. Some pop-up windows raised asking me how to handle the conflict (ex: my PAM configuration is tuned to support Yubikeys. Then, cleanup and the final reboot…

Globally everything went well except some small glitches. First issue and maybe the most boring, my laptop has a Nvidia video adapter and the installed module was incompatible with the new kernel. The easiest way to solve this problem was to upgrade the driver using the packages available. Just added a new repository and upgraded:

# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa
# sudo apt-get update

Within the latest Ubuntu, Firefox has been upgraded to the 3.5 branch. My previous configuration was quite heavy (lot of add-ons) and Firefox refused to work correctly. The symptoms were: slow response, no access to the settings window, unable to access some sites, unable to close some tabs. After a test of all my add-ons one by one, I found the faulty one: SwitchProxy Tool (reported compatible with FF up to 3.6 but it’s definitively NOT). I must now try to find a replacement for this add-on (working from several places, I have a huge list of proxies). If you’ve good references, let me know!

I’m using Compiz and I’m a big fan of the desktop rotation using the wheel mouse. After the upgrade, this feature was broken. Google help me to find the solution.

Empathy is the new instant messenger client but it lacks of a big feature: it does not support SOCKS proxies. And it does not use the proxy configured in Gnome. Shame! I switched back quickly to Pigdin.

After the upgrade, the next big question was: Do I migrate my filesystems to ext4 or not? I’ve a netbook running the same software as my corporate laptop and I switched successfully to ext4 but it seems that there are still nasty bugs around. A migration to ext4 on an existing FS will be boost the performance. Only files created after the migration will benefit of the new features. So, I decided to wait good signs from the community.

In the same time, I performed other upgrades: TrueCrypt 6.3, VirtualBox 3.1.

My system is up’n’running fine for more than 6 hours now. No big issue… Good job Ubuntu! The next big step will be the migration to ext4. Stay tuned.