Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Envy

As I’ve mentioned previously, my graphics card is a little bit problematic.

I had pretty much forgotten about the issues since I discovered “envy”, which did a wonderful job of sorting out the correct Nvidia driver for me.

Unfortunately when I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu Gutsy yesterday I ran into issues. While the upgrade itself went fine (as far as I can see!) envy simply will not work any longer. It throws a totally unhelpful error and doesn’t give anything in the logs (apart from “I’m not happy”).

Hopefully Alberto will release a new version of his scripts that will work, but for the moment I’m stuck using the “nv” driver.

The latest version of Ubuntu replaces Gaim with Pidgin, which isn’t that surprising!

You can also opt to install Swiftweasel to replace Firefox if you are that way inclined. Apparently there are trademark issues with Firefox’s inclusion in distros such as Debian and so the Ubuntu developers maybe replacing Firefox completely.

The rest of the upgrade was quite boring, which is a very good thing! I got prompted about configuration options for various things. Some I kept, others I let the upgrade overwrite.

I’ve heard that other people have had mixed results with the new release, with some people reporting “interesting” issues with sound amongst other things. I’m glad my desktop PC is being so boring!

By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and CEO of Irish hosting provider and domain name registrar Blacknight.

6 comments

  1. I’ve just installed xUbuntu 7.10 on a very old (96MB RAM – after upgrade – Celeron 350MHz, you get the idea) laptop, in an effort to give this much loved machine a new lease of life – it runs ok, and seems more responsive than the Windows ME installation it replaces.
    If I can lay hands on a very cheap NIC/wireless card/dongle I’ll try getting it online, otherwise it will remain an offline curiousity…

  2. Ah the differences in Gnome-2.20 are fantastic! compiling pidgin from source in ubuntu 7.4 was more trouble than it was worth. I’m delighted with this release.
    the update manager froze on me both times I tried to use it but for some reason, aptitude took over later on and completed the upgrade.
    Compiz caused my laptop to freeze without providing any errors in the logs but after a fresh install it’s working great.
    I have to agree. this latest version is very very nice. And, their getting some great publicity by including compiz by default as well.

  3. Darragh
    Why would you bother compiling pidgin when Gaim provides the same functionality?
    Michele

  4. mainly because Pidgin has better support for the latest versions of at-spi and gail and pluss I like messing around with new software.

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