Ubuntu Upgrade: 8.04 to 9.04

Yesterday I upgraded my Ubuntu machine directly from Hardy Heron to Jaunty Jackalope (release candidate 1), in defiance of the release notes. I could not find any specific problems indicating what would happen if I broke the rules so I went ahead anyway and it worked fine—fortunately there is no Change Management Board in this flat!

Upon first boot it is not immediately obvious what is new in this release, although the new ‘Dust’ theme is so polished it feels like my desktop has received a heavy application of windolene, and it was nice to see that my widescreen monitor was now recognised automatically rather than requiring the installation of an additional package. Moving to Jaunty also brought an upgrade of my entire application set, including the latest version of Gnome Do which features an OS X-style dock.

Rarely is an upgrade without issues but this was a pretty good one:

  • The Gnome desktop sharing service (vino-server) now causes X to consume 60% of CPU time even when no one is connected. The only workaround is to turn off desktop sharing.
  • The new human-theme package conflicts with the Blubuntu theme packages. I just left this un-upgraded since I really like the blue theme.
  • Not so much an issue, but after three years of successive upgrades there was some junk that needed to be removed manually: php5 and emacs22 are now default/production (and you still need emacs-snapshot for anti-aliased fonts) so I removed all the php4 and emacs21 packages. There were also half a dozen old kernels that were too out of date to be any use.