Mega-ZBlog

So I’ve been messing with Ubuntu on and off for some time now and the new version 8.04 came up yesterday. I upgraded but I experienced some problems along the way I think others should know about:

• Free Space: Depending on how many extra packages you’ve installed since installing Ubuntu originally, you may need 1.5gb free as I did for downloading. But the unpacking phase ended up taking 1gb more… and left me with as little as 70mb free at one point! I’ll need to expand my partition I guess and shrink my Windows’ partitions. But just be sure you have enough free space.
• Drive mounting: You will probably have to edit your /etc/fstab to fix drive /dev addresses. All /dev/hd* have been changed to /dev/sd*, bumping existing /dev/sd* up and out of the way. Also disc drives are now /dev/scd0, scd1, etc.
• If you use Truecrypt and you can’t mount drives after upgrading, do an apt-get remove truecrypt and then go to the official site and follow the download instructions. Extract the .deb file and do a dpkg -i on it to install it, and truecrypt should work again.
• Upgrading may destroy custom mouse and monitor configurations in xorg.conf. You did make a backup of all your important changes there, didn’t you? This is only a concern if you use multiple monitors (it doesn’t set them up right when upgrading) or if you have a mouse with more than three buttons, since both cases usually require a little surgery on this file to get working right.
• Compiz settings will revert. Use ccsm and set them back manually. ccsm is a bit easier to work with after the upgrade.
• Emerald themes won’t apply to compiz anymore unless you specifically use emerald as your window manager instead of compiz. Weird. Also emerald might hang when you run it… delete ~/.beryl and ~/.emerald/settings.ini, go back into Emerald Theme Manager and reapply your settings, then it should run fine. You probably want to put “emerald –replace” in your startup items under the “Sessions” Administrative thingy so your theme will work on startup.
• There doesn’t seem to be a Wine 0.9.60 build for Ubuntu yet. 🙁 Maybe in a couple days.