Introduction

In January 2008 I finally upgraded from Ubuntu Feisty to Gutsy Gibbon on my Thinkpad X60s. The process was relatively painless (thank you, Ubuntu developers) but hopefully the comments below may be useful to others.

Problems

Upgrade script broken

Running sudo update-manager -c found the distribution upgrade but wouldn't complete it, yielding the following error:

warning: could not initiate dbus
Loading simple Config module ...
Creating backend ...
Loading socket FrontEnd module ...
Starting SCIM as daemon ...
GTK Panel of SCIM 1.4.4
extracting '/tmp/tmpEzFX41/gutsy.tar.gz'
authenticate '/tmp/tmpEzFX41/gutsy.tar.gz' against '/tmp/tmpEzFX41/gutsy.tar.gz.gpg'
could not send the dbus Inhibit signal: global name 'dbus' is not defined
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py", line 914, in on_button_dist_upgrade_clicked
fetcher.run()
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/UpdateManager/Core/DistUpgradeFetcherCore.py", line 178, in run
self.runDistUpgrader()
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/UpdateManager/DistUpgradeFetcher.py", line 53, in runDistUpgrader
if os.getuid() != 0:
NameError: global name 'os' is not defined


The fix that worked for me was to add to the top of /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/UpdateManager/DistUpgradeFetcher.py the following two lines:

import os
import dbus


Desktop Effects

Enabling visual effects through System --> Preferences --> Appearance removed all window decorations. While this problem has a variety of causes, all I needed to do was install the compiz-gnome package.

Wireless key

The wireless key Fn-F5 either does not work or kills the ability of the GNOME network manager to do its job. Haven't tried to fix this.

Networking and suspend

Suspending to memory almost always kills networking ability. After suspending to disk, usually networking is OK, but not always. Restarting the networking service has no effect. Sometimes networking resumes after restarting X and logging in again through CTRL-ALT-Bksp, sometimes not. Haven't tried to fix this.

Lid close and blank screen

After using GNOME power management to select blanking the screen after the lid closes, say on AC power, the screen blanks correctly but stays blank after opening the lid. Switching to external video and back (by pressing Fn-F7 twice) resumes the screen. This problem occurs whether or not Compiz is running. Haven't tried to fix this.

Additional comments

Previous problems

In addition to breaking some things (see above) the upgrade to Gutsy seemed to fix several bugs and issues I encountered during my initial installation of Feisty, having overrode many changes to system files that I had made, with so far no deleterious effects. Gutsy, for instance, correctly responds to ThinkPad's screen brightness keys.

Tracker

After rebooting, the GNOME desktop loaded normally but was slowed quite a bit by a search application called tracker, which I don't recall choosing to install. Tracker is used by Ubuntu as its new search tool in GNOME. Anyways, tracker spent about 15 minutes hogging my CPU to index the hard disk's files, but now all is well.

Fonts

At first I thought something was wrong with all of the fonts, but Gutsy has upgraded subpixel font rendering. I'm still not quite used to the changes. Seems to work beautifully for large sans serif fonts, but my eyes take longer to adjust to the new rendering of smaller, non-bold fonts.