Monday, 10 May 2010

Ubuntu 10.04 Upgrade - notes.

I have upgraded my Ubuntu desktop install to 10.04 (LTS) and plan to keep this machine on LTS releases only since it is mission critical. I don't normally trust the upgrade process, so I backed everything up as usual on an old lappy drive I run from an enclosure.

I ran the upgrade overnight to take advantage of the off-peak rates. Some parts at the start and the end need to be supervised - about a half-hour overall. This can actually be automated for specific computers - eg. in a business setting, but I wanted to act as a normal person who doesn't know what to do.

There were no immediate issues and a preliminary check through my common tasks showed no data loss and everything worked. In fact, the only issues I have are with games.

Battle for Wesnoth became unresponsive in windowed mode. This turns out to be due to rushed packaging for the X server (the program that runs the screen) for 10.04 and will be fixed next update. In the meantime it is not all that critical - I can run BfW in fullscreen mode no problem. (ctrl+f while the game is running to set it)

Alien Arena is seriously awesome in the latest incarnation. Sadly my graphics card sucks bigtime and the poor wee atom processor just cannot cope - resulting in jumpy gameplay. It is not Ubuntu's fault I have cheap hardware, and running high-end games was not one of the criterion for picking the Acer e-Machine EL1600. What interests the reading public here is that sound was disabled after the upgrade.

Running from terminal provides the following information:
------- sound initialization -------
dlopen() on libopenal.so.1 failed
Sound failed: Unable to start OpenAL.
Game will continue without sound.


OpenAL is a sophisticated free software audio API and it is new. Using this system is A Good Thing and, had I installed AA the normal way, it would have been included.

Installing libopenal1 and libopenal-dev packages provides sound. Now everything is peachy.

The only other change I noticed is that OpenOffice.org now sports the Oracle logo instead of the Sun one. Not surprising since Oracle acquired Sun last year.

Overall, a smooth transition. I'll be able to test a fresh install on my laptops later in the week so I'll be up to speed for the Install Party to be held in the Orewa Public Library on the 22nd. The gnu/linux courses are flagged to start the following Thursday.

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