My experience with upgrading my Ubuntu (and Xubuntu) systems from version 9.04 through 10.04 seems to have gone well. As I blabbed about in a post below, I upgraded my parents’ laptop first, then did the same to my own laptop.
Now, I’ve done the process to my music computer. I was worried about this one because that computer actually uses Ubuntu with a GNOME desktop. Those other two I mentioned use Xfce and LXDE respectively. And sure enough, I found myself correcting the window button layout from the left side of the window (which is WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!!) to the right side.
I also, on all three upgraded systems, had to make a little “hack” to get the splash screen to show while the system boots. This is a known bug on upgraded systems from 9.10 to 10.04. To save you the trouble of Googling for it, here it is.
Enter this into a terminal window:
gksu gedit /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash
Then in the file that you can now edit, enter this line:
FRAMEBUFFER=y
Save the file and exit gedit. Then enter this into the terminal window:
sudo update-initramfs -u
After a few seconds you will be able to reboot and see the (fucking dull-ass lame) splash screen for Ubuntu 10.04. Or Xubuntu, or whatever other variant you’re using. I still think the splash screen for 8.04 is the best one so far. Would it hurt to add a progress bar?
Of course, because I upgraded these systems and didn’t do a fresh install on them, I didn’t get GRUB2 installed. That means I don’t get the fast boot time associated with this latest version, but it also means I can still edit the boot menu without fear of fucking something up. I read somewhere that GRUB2 isn’t quite alpha software.
And another thing I need to gripe about is that when I first tried to boot the virtual copy of Windows XP that resides inside my Ubuntu setup on my music computer (via VirtualBox), I ran into a cryptic error message as only VirtualBox can provide. The problem turned out to be a lack of read/write access to my floppy drive. The solution, rather than getting such access, was to take the floppy drive away from my virtual XP.
Meh. I haven’t used the virtual floppy drive in that virtual XP for a very long time, and probably would have never needed it ever again. I don’t know whether VirtualBox doesn’t support floppy drives any more, or whether the latest version of Ubuntu handles them differently, but the floppy is a thing of the past for that setup.
And believe it or not, when I run Cool Edit (which is now Adobe Audition) inside virtual windows XP inside Ubuntu, it’s just as fast as it is running natively under Windows XP and it doesn’t crash at all. I used to have a problem with Cool Edit crashing in Windows XP. It would crash about every other time I attempted to use the Noise Reduction plugin… which I use a lot.
I think I’m rambling now. Time to play some video games.