Upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick)

Date: 2010-10-10 20:50
Tags: #Software, #inuits-planet, #linux, #ubuntu
Read: 3 min read

Today we saw the release of Ubuntu 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat. Because I had some time today I immediately decided to upgrade my laptop. As usual the upgrade succeeded without too much trouble. Clicking a few buttons, letting the computer work for about an hour, reboot, and you are pretty much done.

Except for the few small things which break during upgrade. Out of experience from upgrading previous versions I know there are always a few small things you will have to fix. So here are the steps I did after the upgrade:

The installer disables all your extra PPA's, so when the upgrade has finished I re-enabled those and ran sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade again.
I quickly discovered that Guake didn't use my nice UTF-8 prompt anymore. This turns out to be a bug in VTE. The TERM variable isn't set correctly when launching Guake, so it acts as a dumb terminal. To fix this I changed the method of launching Guake in my startup script. It used to be guake &, and now it is TERM=xterm guake &. Fixed!
During installation I saw that the upgraded had decided to remove cups-pdf. Simply reinstalling it with sudo apt-get install cups-pdf fixed this. I don't really know why it was uninstalled in the first place.
To quickly switch between a one screen and a dual screen configuration I used disper (available from a PPA) on Ubuntu 10.04. Disper doesn't work anymore. However, once you have configured your desired dual screen setup once with the 'Monitors' configuration tool, you can simply open 'Monitors' again and ubuntu will detect the correct screen setup (one or two screens). To setup my correct screen setup I had to open the ATI Catalyst Control Center as root and play a bit with the settings. It was a bit of trial and error, but in the end it turns out support for my setup has improved. With Ubuntu 10.04 I could only select 1440x900 as the largest resolution for my second screen and I had one corner (5 by 5 cm) which was always unusable. Now I can select the correct screen resolution (1680x1050) and it looks awesome.
Because I did an upgrade, some of my settings were kept. I was still using the default ubuntu 10.04 wallpaper, so I manually changed it to the default 10.10 wallpaper (I always like to use the default wallpapers for a while). I also configured the 'programs font' to use the new Ubuntu font, just to give it a try. At first it looked a bit odd, but after using it for a few hours now, I'm starting to like it.