I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) and was reminded once more to never change a running system...
If You consider upgrading, let me tell You: My ClickPad (the touchpad) works better now (multitouch support), but that's about it.
The new Unity desktop is... well let's just say I hate it. It may be useful for the netbook users, it may be nice for people who have never seen anything else, but for me it takes away any efficiency a desktop environment ever provided me with.
So I stuck with Gnome 2 for a few days before reading that it was possible to install Gnome 3 from a PPA. My second mistake. The new Gnome is not half as finished as it may seem. As for now, it slows me down approximately by the same amount that Unity did. Window switching using the mouse takes about twice the time it did before, as does opening Pidgin from the tray. Favorite applications (the ones I put directly into the panel in Gnome 2) also take about twice the time to click. When I open the "Applications" tab in the main menu, I'm being hit in the face by a page with around 90 icons on it (totally useless if You want to find an application), until I select a category. Hotkey support is kinda broken, I cannot make my screen rotate when turning the display and key combos including the "Windows"-key don't seem to work at all.
And last but not least,
gnubiff doesn't work as a panel app since there's no support for panel apps anymore. After an hour of testing, compiling and searching the internet I finally found a version of mail-notification which had SSL support.If You own an HP TouchSmart tm2-1090eg (You will probably have the same problem on similar laptops), there's another great feature of Ubuntu 11.04: Almost guaranteed Kernel Oops during boot! The radeon module tries to dereference a NULL pointer in 3 out of 4 boot cycles, which often leads to a complete system hang. At least it's possible to get the system to boot eventually if You just keep rebooting until it works.
But enough ranting about the new Ubuntu. Here's some good news:
I ported my packages (namely
cpufreq, tablet-mode and video-switcher to Natty and fixed a bug in tablet-mode on the fly! It (once more) didn't read the display identifier (e.g. LVDS1) from the config file but instead always fell back to the default (LVDS1). If You upgrade to Natty, You will I'm not sure wether I will have time to look into the suspend/resume problem Nicolò mentioned in his comment about my last post, but I think I will manage to look into
video-switcher in general. I think about including an upstart script which can cycle through the video cards once on each boot (I had the problem that both video cards were turned off sometimes, but I'm not sure if this persists in 11.04) and I started working on a GUI for the program.I look forward to post some (hopefully good) news again soon!
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