Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade

This is another hot topic on the blogs and forums that discuss
such things. See the slashdot
discussion for examples. The reason people use the Ubuntu flavor of Linux is
that it consistently gives you an upgrade every 6 months, so you
don’t have to be way behind the new, improved versions of
programs, but 6 months is usually enough time to get a set of
tested applications together.

I installed my laptop last week, and have not managed to solve
the problems that my fairly trivial usage on that system shows
up, so it will be a while (or maybe never) before I put it on my
desktop.

The most obvious problem was that the screensaver was asking me
for a password whenever I came back to it. I couldn’t find a
screen where I could tell it not to do that.

I also found a couple of times where the machine was hung when
I came back after being gone for a while, so I removed
xscreensaver, and went with gnome-screensaver, which does have a
screen to tell it not to ask for a password, but it ignores it.

The machine also hung in gnome-screensaver, so I told it not to
run. But it’s still asking me for a password.

This is not behavior I can put up with on the desktop, and if
just going away from the computer is going to break things this
badly, I would say the distribution probably got inadequate
testing.

On the other hand, I haven’t yet found any major problems when
I’m actually using the computer. Firefox, rhythmbox, and Adobe
digital editions under Wine all work fine. There’s one little
glitch with the firefox packaging — you expect there to be a
little firefox icon at the top of the screen. There is a firefox
button, but it’s blank. This is the kind of problem you expect to
encounter in a new distribution. Changing your screensaver
options on you with no path to get them back again is not.

Apparently there are people in the world for whom this upgrade
was easier than the one last April, but I’m not one of them.