Moved over to Gutsy

Just upgraded my notebook to Gutsy a couple of days back. It is still in beta and would be released on 18th October.

I recently changed my desktop over to Gnome from KDE. I have been a Kubuntu/KDE user for years, but the look and feel of KDE has remained tacky for a while now while Gnome had a very clean efficient look about it. But this also meant that I had the complete Gnome and KDE stack on my notebook, so I had to download about 1.2 gigs of updates to move to Gutsy.

The upgrade went fairly well, apart from two or three upgrade failures when there were clashes of file lists between packages. One of them was my fault - I was using pidgin from a different repository because Feisty didn’t have it yet, and now Gutsy did. Two others - Gimp and Cups errors were Ubuntu’s issues, which were very quickly fixed. To solve these problems I had to remove the offending packages and let the upgrading continue. And when the fixes came in, I dist-upgraded again.

There is now a bit of a feeling of betrayal. One of the reasons I upgraded to Gutsy in beta because it was supposed to have xorg 7.3. I wanted xorg 7.3 which supposedly had multiple monitor hot plugging support. It seems that the package maintainer decided not to go in for xorg 7.3 now, even though he backported some of its features into 7.2.

The experimental intel xorg driver works, even though I have experienced the screen going blank once or twice which had to fixed by a hard reset. :(

Not much of new features in this new release. Compiz is now supposed to be enabled by default in new installs, but I always turn it off because of my bad experiences in the past and the fact that I don’t really really need it. Other stuff being new versions of all packages, that is all.

Since I still use various KDE packages in Gnome like Amarok, Digikam, etc., I am still figuring out what I can remove from my current install of the KDE setup without affecting these two apps.

I have started using Gnome Evolution just for its calendar (I dont particularly like Sunbird, and calendar on Evolution is n-i-c-e). I wish there was some integration between Thunderbird and Evolution regarding the calendar part, but I know it is too much to ask and is not going to happen. ;)

I discovered recordmydesktop the other day, and I quite impressed to say the least.

Anyway, till the release happens, hundreds of megs of updates are rolling in every day. So if you are stuck with a small pipe at home, it would probably be wiser to wait till the stable release - some of those updates are really needed!