Ubuntu upgrade today

[MrHacks]

I usually like to wait on the new distros for a couple of months until I am certain the major bugs have been resolved. Today, I am upgrading my netbook in time for the new year.

For 2012, I'd really like to start using the following
* GNOME 3 (finally!)
* proxies/VPN (Tor is being abused, so I'm going to need to figure out how to use theme the more technical way. This is important for IRC, USENET and the Internet. I'll cite my grivances with Tor later after the upgrade)
* Arduino (already doing that)
* Usenet (There's something about GigaNews that I just don't like and is the reason I haven't subscribed to them yet.)
* Remote Desktoping/VNC (I haven't summoned the courage to do this yet with my local machines given my security concerns. If those fears can be put to bed, that would be swell.)

Well, I'm off to run the upgrade. Wish me luck!

[MrHacks]

Upgrade was a success.

There are a few things I should state though that will be important for future reference.

1) If you see an message that constantly states throughout the upgrade

      xset: unable to open display ""

don't mess with it.  It's perfectly normal. Don't mess with the computer even if this shows up.

I was foolish enough to think that typing "sudo vbetools dpms off" after everything was done would resolve this issue.  The truth is that it does not.  It just shuts off the backlight on an LCD screen. And if your power conservation settings kick in after letting it idle for 10 minutes or so (I have mind set up for 10 minute, YMMV), the light won't come back on unless you close the lid and let the computer hibernate.

I'm hoping that "sudo vbetools dpms on" was the initial setting and that things will go back the way they were before.  If anyone know what the initial setting is for this, please post it so that I can be sure not to make this foolish mistake again.

2) I finally found a use for Evolution: Email and Contacts backup.  It's usefulness as a calendar sucks.  It only synced one of my email calendars, it kept begging me for my password after I told it a million times, and it doesn't seem to enjoy handling more than one calendar.

In case you are wondering, I intentionally removed Thunderbird.  Mozilla software just doesn't seem to play well with subnotebook architecture due to it's greedy memory consumption.

As for Email backup, I'm glad that I finally have a copy of all the mail in my GMail inbox, but disappointed that any organizational changes (i.e. deleting a whole bunch of old insignificant email from like shopping newsletters) made in Evolution will not occur in GMail.  Maybe it's how the imapx/IMAP+ protocol works  I was really hoping to toss out a lot of old stuff.  Evolution recognizes labels as folders.  How it reacted to some mail that had two different labels, I haven't check it out yet.  Hopefully it didn't make duplicates.

3) I gave GNOME 3 an second chance.  Installing it (as the package called 'gnome') will remove the libpanel-applet-3.0 package.  I'm not sure if that is important or obsolete, but if anyone knows and if I should reinstall it, the help would be accepted.

As beautiful as it GNOME3 is, there are still many grievances that I don't like about it and that still have me using Unity.

1. The time clock is in the top center of the screen.  I'd rather have it on the right side of the screen (be it top right or bottom right) with all the other toolbar icons.

2. Is it me, or can I not move widgets around. Like I could in GNOME 2?  It would have been more ideal to put the list of open applications on the bottom where I used to put them.

3. If there is anything to praise Unity about it is that it conserves screen space.  I guess the reason that keeps me using Unity is the fact that the title bar and the menubar are stored up on the top like of the screen, almost OSX-like.

4. Applications were listed twice in the GNOME3's Dash Menu. Once with a low res icon and a second time with the more hi res icon.

5. Adding icons to GNOME3's Dash get incredibly ugly as the icons continue to get smaller.

So, I'm still using Unity. At least the way it works is doing better.  Although, I would still like to see some changes.

1. When I am in Application A about to switch to Application B, of which Application B has two or more windows open, I'd like to see a list of all the open windows of Application B when I click on Application B's icon in the dock rather than the current way things are where when I click on Application B one of the B windows, which is generally the window I do not want, comes into focus.  Clicking on B's icon whith a B window in focus to show a table preview view of all othe open instances of B can still happen, but when I'm in A and want to open a specific B window, I want a list to appear in next to the icon so that I can pick the right B window.

2. While can't the tool bar window be transparent?  While I've put up with this and at times see the understanding for it to be that dark gray line (as it would look a bit shoddy given whatever desktop walpaper you use, it still would be good to have that as an option.

3. The option where you can make the Dash appear in the upper left corner instead of whenever the mouse touches the left side of the screen appears to be gone.  If anyone knows where it when, I would be much obliged.

4. Is it me or when ever I use Chromium (or in rare cases Firefox) when I want to open an item I just downloaded, does Nautilus open up or do I get a message stating "Can not open item, it is not a folder'?  I just like using evince (a.k.a. Document Viewer) to read PDFs.  Why does it do that?  It never did that last year.

At any rate, that seems to be everything worth mentioning at the moment.

[MrHacks]

Still having dpms issues.  I wish the vbetool man pages were more specific about what settings I need to do to get dpms to work without have to put my computer to sleep to get the screen to light up again.

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