Also, Ubuntu has an aggressive schedule, which means release are made every 6 months. I believe the purpose of the April (.04) releases is to introduce new features, and the October (.10) release is to refine them and fix any breaks. Compare this approach to Windows or Macintosh, where releases are made around every three years, and you can appreciate that releasing little and often means that changes are more diffuse and less apparent.

I performed the Upgrade option from 8.04 to 8.10, as I'd only just installed 8.04 on this machine. If I'd been running it for a year or more, I probably would have done a clean install, just to blow away the crud, but this time I just clicked the button and left it to go. Its a good idea to leave yourself plenty of time for this, not only because downloading the packages can take a while, but also because the chances are that something will break in the upgrade. Its also worth waiting a week or two before upgrading, as that gives people a chance to discover problems and post solutions to them online.

Downloading all the packages took around 12 hours on my crappy connection, so I left it to go overnight. If you do this, make sure you get to the part where it actually says its downloading the package files, otherwise you'll wake up in the morning with a dialog box on your screen, and zero packages downloaded. Luckily it will still roll back to 8.04 at this point, so its not the end of the world.

OK, so having run the upgrade, the first thing to do is Reboot, and then put all your third party repositories back in place. I did this by opening System > Administration > Software Sources and physically visiting the URIs listed in each place. If there was an 'intrepid' directory on the site, I'd change hardy to intrepid in the Edit box. If not, then I'd leave it on hardy. After this, a big global Re-check and Install Updates is in order, just to check you have the latest and greatest of everything. One more reboot and its time to look around. A few things had broken, but first, lets look at the great successes.

First of all I was enormously pleased to see that my Dell Vostro 1400 wireless was working. Properly! I checked in Hardware Drivers, and Windows Wireless Drivers and neither of those were active, so the new kernel was properly supporting my wireless. This, I feel is one of the most important enhancements for the 8.10 release: the more wireless chipsets that 'just work' the better the chances Ubuntu will get adopted.

Dual Head also worked. Ironically the previous day I'd just spent a couple of hours trying to get this to work on 8.04, and on 8.10 it worked without any fiddling: just fire up the System > Preferences > Screen Resolution applet and it detects the two monitors and lets you configure them how you wish. They've achieved that by doing away with the settings from /etc/X11/xorg.conf. However that meant I had to look elsewhere to get my TouchPad Toggling Script to work.

I hear the Network Manager is a lot better now as it can configure GPRS connections as well as wireless and wired connections. However I'm using wicd for now, so I'll look at that later. Also of note in this area is that networks configured via NetworkManager are brought up during boot, which is handy if you need to do things from the command line before logging into your desktop.

The Guest Session is interesting, allowing you to lend your computer to someone in a secure manner — all settings are temporary and disappear after logging out, and there is no access to the file system, so theoretically no damage can be done. This didn't work at first for me, perhaps as a consequence of upgrading rather than installing fresh. Initially I was just presented with a login screen (which clearly a Guest Account shouldn't need). However, by running the script from the command line

/usr/share/gdm/guest-session/guest-session-launch

I was able to make it work, and subsequently its worked from the button as well.

Another security feature is having an encrypted Private folder set up in a ~/Private directory. This is automatically locked and unlocked as you log in and out. As a sidenote its not entirely secret as the encrypted files can be accessed in your ~/.Private directory (ie with a dot). These can't be read, but the file names are the same as the unencrypted versions, so best not to call them anything too explicit: secret_plan_to_take_over_the_world.doc for example.

To set this up you have to do some work. Type:

sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils

ecryptfs-setup-private

In terms of actual software updates there hasn't been much as previously noted. GIMP has been upgraded to the 2.6 release which has a much nicer interface. VLC has a facelift, but it seems that some of the video encoding capability has been stripped out. Still trying to fix this. Virtual Box upgraded fine, and even compiled its own modules for the new kernel, so that was pretty seamless. Open Office 3, as noted elsewhere, was skipped in this version, but I'm sure it will be along soon.

Other tweaks: Totem can now play content from the BBC, although most of it seems to only be available in the UK. What's the point of that? Clam AV is now available, and hopefully they'll make a decent interface for it soon. And if you could turn on real time on-access scanning at will, that would be cool. Maybe next time.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the way things are going. The whole point for me is to make this easy to use rather than following Vista's lead into confusing user interfaces and bloat, and the Ubuntu developers seem to remain focused on the things which will help them gain user share.

So, a few quick notes. The re-installation process was painless. I have my data on a separate /home partion, so I just backed that up to a separate USB hard disk (using partimage on a Gparted boot CD), and installed Ubuntu over the top of my Mandriva partition.I have to say the Ubuntu installer is a bit simpler than the Mandriva one when it comes to the business of disk partitioning.

It took a few minutes of jiggling to re-arrange the partitions once the install had finished, but then I was good to go. I took out some bits of software I didn't need, installed a few must-have applications so I could get on with my work, and finshed the rest of the day happy. In this case the fact that truecrypt had suddenly broken in Mandriva was the deciding factor, as I needed data on that partition to work: once I had that working on Ubuntu, which I have to say was seamless, then I was good to go.

Overnight I installed some more software and did an update to get the software up to date. I have a very slow connection so this kind of thing takes a few hours. I rebooted and everything was fine. For a few days.

But then last night after having worked all day, I switched my computer on again to play a DVD which was skipping on my standard DVD player. It took an age to boot up and wireless didn't work. Also everything was sluggish, taking sometimes two or three seconds to respond to a keypress. I played the DVD and went to bed, sulking.

I really couldn't understand why it was behaving like this all of a sudden. I hadn't done any kernel updates (RKUH!) in the last few days, which is my normal source of instability, and consequent insanity. I checked dmesg, and tracked it down to this section:

[ 33.957128] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[ 34.915447] hda: FUJITSU MHV2060AH, ATA DISK drive
[ 34.915591] hda: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4
[ 34.919261] hda: UDMA/100 mode selected
[ 34.922862] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[ 34.992563] Probing IDE interface ide1...
[ 35.302438] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = 136417566 ns)
[ 35.306438] Time: acpi_pm clocksource has been installed.
[ 35.319400] hdc: UJDA750 DVD/CDRW, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[ 35.319603] hdc: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4
[ 35.319706] hdc: UDMA/33 mode selected

After searching for a bit, I thought the "Clocksource tsc unstable" looked likely and it seemed that a few other people had been experiencing long boot times due to it. I added clocksource=hpet to my boot stanza, and bingo, boot is once again fast and wireless works like a dream.

So, although the fix was fast, once again I'm forced to ponder the question "Why did this suddenly happen?" My Thinkpad R51e has always caused me problems with Linux due to its 'special' hardware, but really, if I didn't change anything on the system, why should it suddenly start doing this to me? And if I was a normal guy-in-the-street user, how long do you think it might take me to fix this? Or indeed, to run scuttling back to Windows?

But up until now, I'd only been using a Wired connection. The built-in wireless on my Thinkpad R51e didn't work with Ubuntu, and a few attempts to fix it were not rewarded with success. I decided to wait until I had a weekend free to sort it all out. In the interim, if I needed wireless, I had a Buffalo Airport PCMCIA card which worked perfectly when I plugged it in.

Fixing Wireless.

The truth of the matter is that by the time I actually fixed the wireless, I'd tried so many things that I'm not entirely sure which one worked. After install, the installer had found the wireless hardware — a built in Intel chipset, based around an Atheros chip. The lspci command identified this as the Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01) . Based on this, the installer had chosen the madwifi drivers.

My attempts to connect with my Access point were not successful. I unplugged the ethernet cable, and then tried to connect with the Access point running WPA2, using the Network Manager which is present in the bottom right corner of the menubar. Guessing that WPA2 was the problem, I changed the encryption down to WEP, which although it isn't a very secure protocol, is supported by almost all hardware, and is at least better than nothing. Finally I dropped all encryption and tried to connect to the AP with no encryption. Still no luck.

• iwconfig reported all the right things, but
• dhclient couldn't get me an IP address, and
• /etc/init.d/networking restart also had no effect.

I thought there might be a problem with the drivers, so I upgraded to the latest version of the madwifi drivers, grabbed directly from the madwifi site, rather than the slightly older ones which the repository had installed for me. Still no luck.

I then tried using the Windows drivers which had worked previously in windows. I mounted my Windows partition and used the "Windows Wireless Drivers" applet supplied with Linux Mint (essentially a front end to ndiswrapper) to install them. No luck. I then found some more recent drivers on the Lenovo support site. I uninstalled the previous drivers and installed the new ones. No luck.

I then tried upgrading ndiswrapper to a more recent version and tried some other drivers from a step-by-step guide which someone else had created on the Internet. Maybe this one worked, maybe not. I'd tried so many things by now I'd lost track of where I was. Eventually I got it working with a combination of ndiswrapper and Windows drivers, and had probably spent a whole day trying to get it going. Irritating. And the best I could do was use WEP. I decided not to experiment with WPA2. I have

• ndiswrapper version 1.45
• Unknown windows net5211 driver

Having said that, there are a few problems with this current setup. Occasionally it forgets its WEP key and asks for it again. Changing from wired to wireless networks usually confuses it, so a reboot is the best way to do that. Changing networks from one AP to another is also problematic. A bad job all round, but I'm limping along with it.

Virtualization

A week or so went by without incident and it was time to consider the final stage: moving Windows to a virtual machine and getting rid of the old Windows partition. Here are the main stages.

1. Make a windows install CD from the install files on the windows partition (Thinkpads don't have an install CD, they use an Install partition)
2. Install vmware on Ubuntu and make a Windows Virtual Machine.
3. Delete the old Windows and IBM Install partitions
4. Re-arrange the remaining partitions to suit the new arrangement.

These will take some time to explain, so I'll do it in the next post.

Update 2nd April 2008: Got WPA2 working. Didn't change anything, but it just decided to work. Maybe an update in the background updated some critical files. Lets see if it still forgets the WPA key.