2007-10-22T22:48:29 Gutsy upgrade awful: I upgraded my laptop from ubuntu feisty to gutsy, and nothing got better. Several things broke. While trying to fix them, I improved my setup a little tiny bit.
The auto installer failed several times on cupsys. Then it had some exception while working on initramfs (!) and gave up. Somewhere during the upgrade, my keyboard broke and was typing nonsense. At least that corrected after the reboot.
On reboot, I seem to be on 7.10 despite the upgrade saying it failed. I reinstalled cupsys and a few other things. I used to use ndiswrapper and linux-wlan-ng for my two wifi adapters, but neither of those work now. The bcm43xx module seems to work, so I can run my worse-quality wifi adapter. linux-wlan-ng claims not to support kernel 2.6.22, so I guess I can't use my usb wifi card for now.
The gutsy version of the power applet started waking up every 30 seconds to tell me I unplugged, when really I was running on AC power and my flaky battery wasn't charging. (It starts charging after a few remove/replugs.)
I tried 'desktop effects' to see if compiz would work. It broke my desktop switching and added window shadows. I restarted X, and lost window borders but gained wobble windows. I never got desktop shadows back. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3600201 worked for disabling Xgl, which was taking lots of CPU.
emacs wouldn't start. It said "No fonts match 'Monospace-10'". I found various matches for that phrase in google, but didn't see a solution.
Sick of gnome and its WMs, I installed fvwm2 which is what I use on all my desktops. I had it start up with gnome-panel to get the applets I was used to. I thought fvwm had a control for "don't let windows move into this panel's space", but I can't find it now. Anyway, running fvwm instead of metacity is the small improvement I performed today. The suspend button on gnome-panel now quits gnome-panel, so I made a different launcher for "gksudo /etc/acpi/sleep.sh". I'm not sure how to do suspend without requiring a sudo.
Over in fvwm (or maybe after enough X restarts), emacs started working again.
Then I discovered http://www.fvwm.org/doc/unstable/modules/FvwmTabs.html which looks like it might be great if I can stop tripping on its focus bugs.
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Forgot to mention: the text-mode virtual consoles don't have logins anymore. That's sure to bite me when I'm doing some important demo for someone.
