Sunday 21 October 2007

Cheeky Monkey 7.10

or should that be Gutsy Gibbon? You know it should. That's right I made the switch to Gutsy yesterday. I started off with a bit a reading on the web regarding the upgrade - got bored with that so just hit the button and off it went...

Have to say, the upgrade went pretty smooth. Didn't really need to do much. I was a bit worried that it would lose some of my config changes such as my alterations to the USB permissions thing. Even that didn't worry me unduly because I could have just looked the information up on the web again. As a pleasant surprise the upgrade routine asks whether to install the new version of various config files when it comes across differences. This meant I could just keep the various files where I'd made changes - sorted.

The whole upgrade process took about 2 hours, including downloading the thousand plus files. Once upgraded all that was required was a simple reboot and job done.

So where there any problems? Only one, my window borders were missing - a fairly major problem you'll agree. I could run programs but had no way to move windows around - doh. Anyway, a bit of searching around the web found a setting in the X Config that needed to be set, running the following from xterm fixed the problem, sudo nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24, then a restart of X and voila.

The only other problem - which was not really a problem - was I had to reset my compiz effects which had all been lost and this meant installing the compiz-config-manager. Now seeing as this is used to set up compiz - which is included by default in Gutsy - I would have assumed it would be part of the upgrade - now that's strange. Anyway, once installed I was able to set up my 3D effects just the way I like it.

So there it is, the upgrade was pretty painless but the other big question is it better than Feisty? To be honest I haven't really noticed much difference. I'm sure there are tons of differences under the hood but in use I don't notice anything. Still, since it was so easy to do I guess it's worth staying up to date.