Wait For It .... !

[jglen490]

Now that I've been using Precise (12.04.1) it was well worth the wait to the first upgrade (12.04 -> 12.04.1) before installing. I was concerned that my low power machine would not handle it well. Yes, there are some issues, but those issues are only related to boot speed and the combined "weight" of multiple applications running at once.

I like it; I can adapt.

[Snowhog]

I can adapt.

"You are Borg. Resistance was futile."

[jlittle]

Well, I waited for 12.04.1 (and for more RAM), and the install had 3 major problems:

1. Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer) kept crashing on the manual partition set up step. I knew the partitions I wanted for swap, / and /home, but I had to *not* specify the swap, and not mark the / partition to be formatted, to tip toe around the crash.

2. Grub was badly installed and the PC booted to a black screen, the screen itself eventually complaining "analog out of range". It was in fact still there, and I could fly blind and boot stuff, but it wasn't obvious.

3. Upon log in Kubuntu just didn't work. It was like kwin would discard most events but sometimes hold on to a mouse click for a while, then let it go when the next event arrived, so long as it was different. So a click on the K would be actioned 10 seconds later on a right click somewhere else. Press At-F2, nothing happens. Click on the K, and the box comes down from the top of the screen. Click in the box, type something, and the K menu is shown. Trying to get a console by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 gave me a black screen, and "analog out of range".

(I ran the test on the CD, it was fine.)

I won't relate the tortuous path I took to solve these, there'd be no point other than embarrassing myself. But:

2. is avoided by pressing F6 and selecting nomodeset, on the first screen the installer presents. This makes the console work too, though the boot splash is text mode and clunky.

3. At the login screen, click the little arrow and select the "failsafe" option. Then, one can login in to a functional Kubuntu, go to system settings, desktop effects, and disable the Blur effect.

Easy when one knows how, but IMO not good on a .1 LTS release. There's something badly wrong about that Blur effect, if it affects the mouse and keyboard.

Regards, John

[jglen490]

"You are Borg. Resistance was futile."

But it felt so good --- uh, logical, yeah that's it!!

As was the case with the past couple of new Kubuntu distros, the online update was totally smooth, completely painless and resulted in an instantly (well that's a stretch), or at least quickly usable install. Even the follow-on major dist-upgrades went well. I like this Precise Pangolin - whatever THAT is *<{;o)

[jglen490]

Now, the only bad thing, and it's really minor (for the most part). Around my application launcher, all the way over to the system tray the normally very narrow border displays as really wide and ugly. It only is a distraction when I need to launch an application. It doesn't interfere with being able to select an application, it's just ugly. I'm going to attribute this appearance problem to my primitive video sub-system on this machine, unless someone has a great idea. Thanks.