I’ve been running a dual boot on my laptop with Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). I recently upgraded to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) so that I’d be ready to try out 7.10 when it came out. I don’t use the laptop much, so it’s good for experimentation. I don’t expect to upgrade my main desktop from Feisty right away.
I first tried the upgrade route through the update manager. It was a little bit slow on Friday with everyone hitting the Ubuntu servers, but I made it through the process and had the brand shiny new Gutsy Gibbon running with no trouble.
I did the upgrade, wanting to verify that it worked ok, but my real plan was to wipe out everything and start fresh with 7.10. No more Windows there (although I’m not Windows free yet, but more on that later). I had downloaded the ISO image via BitTorrent. I’m pretty sure that Comcast is interfering with my BitTorrent upload. I downloaded the image just fine, but nothing was going up. I wanted to leave it running to help distribution, but no luck there. I should complain to them about this, I guess. What a sucky thing to do.
Then I was disappointed that the Desktop “Live CD” didn’t boot correctly. I got the initial menu, and saw the Ubuntu logo as it was starting, but when it got to the point of showing the desktop, the display was severely borked. I could barely tell I was looking at the top GNOME panel, hideously distorted, but there was nothing I could do. The Edgy Live CD had worked fine last year when I tried it and then installed from it. I also tried safe graphics mode, but that would keep getting hung up at some point when it was supposed to start the display.
I’ve been amazed at how well these live CDs work, but this is the second time I’ve seen one fail to work on a system. Another time I wanted to demonstrate Ubuntu on my father-in-law’s machine, but no luck there either. And there was a coworker who said it wouldn’t work on his machine either, although I didn’t personally witness that one.
So I downloaded the Alternate ISO with text-based installer, and that worked just fine. It wouldn’t help those people who want to try before “buying,” but it was good for me in this situation.
When I did the upgrade first, and then on the fresh install, I noticed a bunch of new directories in my home dir:
- Documents
- Music
- Pictures
- Public
- Templates
- Videos
I’ve spent most of my Gibbon Time thus far figuring out what these are and how to do things with them, but that’s the subject for another post.
Gutsy looks good. Not a lot different in my cursory inspection so far, but OpenOffice.org 2.3 is included, there is the newer version of Tomboy with synchronization, and a new version of the Evince document viewer that has support for Adobe FDF (Forms Data Format). I think it’s great that they’re releasing regularly. It keeps interest up. This is the first real upgrade cycle for me. Previously I’ve installed clean versions of Edgy and Feisty and only recently updated my two Edgy installations to Feisty, which I had already been using on my main desktop. I don’t expect a seamless upgrade; I wouldn’t be surprised if some things develop problems, but if everything goes as smoothly as I’ve seen so far, I’ll be happy to update a couple of times per year to keep current. I’m looking forward to the continued development and gradual improvement in each version.
Related: New Dirs in Gutsy: Documents, Music, Pictures, Blah, Blah
2 Comments
My Documents->xp
My Music-> Itunes/Amorock
My Pictures-> Kodak/Digicam
My Webs-> Public
My Videos-> Itunes
Templates-> Buried in Office
I have been using My_Documents etc. for some time. The reason for the underscore is the allergy of certain unix based programs to a space.
If someone wants to make Documents, Music, Pictures, Public, Videos, Templates part of the Linux Filesystems standard more power to them. Remember My Documents started out in XP as your visible home directory and that was it.
Cheers
22 October 2007 at 9:16 am
It’s not just in Unix that the space can be a problem — Windows itself has its own issues with them, which is why it’s even more annoying that MS made programs go in “Program Files”, and the home dir as “C:\Documents and Settings\username”. I used to try changing things to use spaceless folder names, but it became too much to fight city hall. :-)
(In both environments the space can be handled, of course, but not all programs may handle them correctly.)
Thanks for your comment — I could guess what they were supposed to be for, but I wanted to find out more under the covers how they might be configured as common directories. I have another post coming up about GTK Bookmarks and the freedesktop XDG directory specification.
22 October 2007 at 10:40 am