Since I’ve apparently been struck by upgrade fever, I also upgraded my home PC to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The upgrade went pretty smoothly. I only had to tweak a few things to get things working fully.

Wifi

I’m using a wifi dongle using the rt73 drivers, which did not just compile on the new kernel (with the new wifi stack), but luckily a fresh cvs checkout fixed that. Out with the old drivers, in with the new ones, and then I could configure the network via the GUI.

X

Getting the Nvidia drivers went ever so smoothly. On first boot I was told there were restricted drivers available. I answer yes to downloading them, rebooted, and bang, full resolution. Nice.

Nifty graphics with Compiz

Whenever I switched on the effects compiz just died on me. To get it working, I had to insert these the “Screen” section in xorg.conf:

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

Restart X, and then System, Preferences, Appearance, Visual Effects and enable them. Neat. I also installed compizconfig-settings-manager to be able to configure it in detail which effects I wanted.

Fix SSH, again again

I have not bothered to find out why, but the default ssh config has an insane session setup time for me. Inserting “GSSAPIAuthentication no” in /etc/ssh/ssh_config fixes that.

Swooshy Effects woes

With that I’m up and running. Swooshy effects and all. That said, the swooshy effects (Compiz) is not 100% ready for prime time on my PC. First, Firefox is dead slow. I had hoped that was fixed, but alas, it’s not. It’s close to unusable. It also tends to crash with a “BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)” error occasionally. Hrm.

Second, I’ve crashed twice since installing. Both during X action, like opening a window, where compiz is showing off (I have it set to maximum effects). Something is not quite right. It might very well be the nvidia drivers though. Nevertheless, I’ll probably cave in and disable the effects for now.

Third, if I’m really putting pressure on the CPU, switching desktops or doing other window manager things does not respond. That’s just not good enough. Something must be running with the wrong priority.

Conclusion

But except from these graphics woes, it is actually running pretty smoothly. It’s definitely going in the right direction!

Update: Some on tells me that my crash is probably this bug.