Upgrade to Ubuntu Edgy

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) was scheduled to release on October 26. I was too eager to update to the new release and so I upgraded to release candidate version before the official release. And here is my experience on this upgrade.

After the update, I don't notice any significant improvement. However, my X server couldn't start, since the ati driver was used in /etc/X11/xorg.conf but the package xserver-xorg-video-ati had not been installed. I switched to the fglrx driver and successfully started X, and hoped that I could have better hardware support using the proprietary driver. Everything looks good until I tried to start the openoffice! It gave me this error when I started it in a terminal:

Unknown error forking main binary / abnormal early exit

After googling for a while and looking at the Ubuntu forum, I found that it is related to ATI driver. So I switched back to the open-source ati driver, restarted the computer, and then the openoffice could run again! After this, I still tried to get my proprietary driver to work, trying different versions (8.26.18, 8.29.6) in addition to the one given in Edgy repository. Without luck, all trials failed. So instead of spending extra hours (in addition to the many hours I have spent!) on this, I decided to use the open-source ati driver. By the way, the display card I am using is RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10].

Other changes that I have noticed (or feel useful) after the upgrade include:

• Gaim 2.0 can now display the custom smiley in msn. But actually I hate this custom smiley, since I always can't understand what those custom smiley means!
• Evolution 2.8 supports a vertical preview message pane for mails.
• Tomboy seems to be an large improvement for note taking.
• It has GnuCash 2.0 now.
• Firefox 2.0 is available, but I don't see many (useful) improvements with it except the tab handling.
• The default Ubuntu Human theme is quite ugly.