[ale] Ubuntu recommendations

[Chuck Peters]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Ron Frazier
<atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com>wrote:

> This thread's a bit old but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.  The guys
> over at the Going Linux podcast http://www.goinglinux.com/ seem to say,
> from accounts from listeners, to not do upgrades.


Upgrades can break things, and new installs can be broken as well.  Usually
a little problem solving will fix either case.   If it is important to you
or a production system, upgrades or new installs should be tested prior to
making changes.

If a user has problems with an upgrade, it often has something to do with
user profile settings.  In that case just move the profile or delete it.
 For example firefox settings are in ~/.mozilla, openoffice is in ~.
openoffice.org and libreoffice in .libreoffice etc...  Or you can spend more
time and figure out whatever it is in the profile and fix it, and that
usually isn't worth the time.

Profile settings, as well as flash cookies and the browser cache and cookies
can sometimes get foobarred.  A couple recent problems I helped users with
were dolphin, the KDE file manager and gmail.  Deleting the dolphin profile
and deleting the browser cookies and cache fixed them.

Later, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 with a fresh
> install by wiping out the Linux partition and am still using it.  I've
> noticed the upgrade to 10.10 prompt but haven't bitten the hook.


That doesn't sound right, if you installed LTS you should not be prompted
for an upgrade until the next LTS.

What does your /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades contain?

root at darwin:~# cat /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
# Default behavior for the release upgrader.

[DEFAULT]
# Default prompting behavior, valid options:
#
#  never  - Never check for a new release.
#  normal - Check to see if a new release is available.  If more than one
new
#           release is found, the release upgrader will attempt to upgrade
to
#           the release that immediately succeeds the currently-running
#           release.
#  lts    - Check to see if a new LTS release is available.  The upgrader
#           will attempt to upgrade to the first LTS release available after
#           the currently-running one.  Note that this option should not be
#           used if the currently-running release is not itself an LTS
#           release, since in that case the upgrader won't be able to
#           determine if a newer release is available.
Prompt=lts

For me, fresh
> installs, regardless of being Windows or Linux, are very tedious,
> because there are many dozens of little settings and tweaks to the
> system that I do, plus installing user apps, that take about a week to
> get through.  I don't like doing them.


Did you know about the dpkg --get-selections and --set-selections?
It may not be the best thing to use directly when an upgrade is involved,
but it can help get a system back where it was when reinstalling.


> So, for now, I'm still with
> 10.04.  There are two other reasons I'm not upgrading.  Firefox 4, which
> broke almost all my nice status bar apps when I installed it on Windows,
> so I immediately reverted back to the older version.


Firefox 4 had its last release, now you can try FF5 which has bug fixes and
security updates for FF4.  And the Mozilla folks have a meeting next week to
try and decide how long they will support the 3.6 series.  I think the
Mozilla people are doing a great job at confusing users...

One thing I would like to know is, and I haven't found an easy solution, how
I can run both  firefox 3.6 with my old profile and the new firefox 5 and
not have the profiles step over each other.  From what I have learned thus
far it looks like I will have to get into the source, tweak it and build
customized packages. And what is most aggravating about that is modifying
the Ubuntu packages and redistributing them could be illegal without further
modifications due to the Mozilla Trademark and their failure to reply to
my inquiry about the trademark licensing.  Debian has good reasons for
%s/renaming/calling/ firefox iceweasel...


>  Then, there's also
> Unity, which I ranted about before.
>

Then use the old Gnome now called "Ubuntu Classic" or KDE.  It was the first
production release of Unity, I think it will be a lot better by the next LTS
in April 2012.  I use KDE mostly and other than the crashes the one thing I
don't like about Unity is how it works when one changes the focus to follow
the mouse.


Chuck
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