Richard Jones' Log: Ubuntu Breezy time

Wed, 19 Oct 2005

I've just upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu's "Breezy" 5.10 release. This was a mostly-painless exercise (to start it off I edited "/etc/apt/sources.list" and replaced all occurrences of "hoary" with "breezy"). Unfortunately:

  1. I had previously installed kubuntu's kde 3.4.2 package, and I had to remove the kubuntu line from my sources.list, rather than try to find an updated line from the kubuntu website (which I tried to do in vain for about half an hour of searching).
  2. A lot of packages weren't found on the au.archive.ubuntu.com mirror, so once I ran the dist-upgrade once, I edited sources.list to use us.archive.ubuntu.com and re-ran dist-upgrade and all the files were found.
  3. There was a dependency problem once installation started - for some reason I had to manually (and --force-depends) install the python2.4-elementtree package.
  4. X11 didn't start up properly. I've installed the nvidia drivers from nvidia, and that means editing my xorg.conf. This means the X11 update didn't patch my xorg.conf to fix the font paths (moved from /usr/lib/X11R6/X11 to /usr/share/X11) X11 barfed because it couldn't find the default font.

On the plus side, my cheap-ass surround sound card (a "Creative Ectiva Audio 5.1") is now detected by the OS (as a "Dell Sound Blaster Live!"). Also, Kaffeine doesn't go totally mental with the CPU when it quits, which is nice. There will probably be other benefits too :)

KDE still hasn't fixed the whitespace bug in Konqueror's textarea field. This bug has been on-again, off-again for years now (it was fixed in 3.3 for a while).

Also, Konqueror "view source" still uses Kate, which bitches about the source "being deleted by another program" every single time it's used. Very, very annoying for someone who uses "view source" a lot. I still haven't figured how to configure it to use a less ... intelligent text viewing program.