OS Agnostic

Last night I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. I didn’t really want to yet, but somehow Gnome got borked and I figured an upgrade (from the cli) might solve the problem. Well, it did- Gnome came back- but I had so many other problems that I’ll be reinstalling 7.10 tonight.

There were a lot of little usability issues- menus in different places, etc., that were minor annoyances. But the reason I will be rolling back comes down to 2 issues:

Firefox 3 Beta

Don’t get me wrong, Firefox 3 looks nice and has great new functionality. But it doesn’t work with my extensions, and I REALLY need it to at least work with Zotero. I’ll wait to use Firefox 3 until it is officially released (in June, I think). I know I can patch extensions to run and all that, but I just don’t want to.

Synergy

As demoed in this crappy video, I use Synergy to move my mouse between my workstations. This has completely changed the way I work and I can’t live without it now. It’s great when one computer is being laggy or not behaving right, I just jump over to the other computer for a bit. Anyway, Synergy client isn’t working in Hardy Heron for me. I googled it, found this thread, which suggests running Synergy as root (sudo synergyc host) but that didn’t work for me either.

Rolling back

So I’m going to reinstall 7.10 tonight- not a big deal, my /home folder is on another partition so it shouldn’t be a problem, and I’ve already backed up the home folder just in case.

I realize that some of the problems might be solved if I did a clean install- obviously something went wrong with the system sometime Monday night. I have been running Hardy on my laptop for over a month without issue. The only thing I can think is that installing Inkscape somehow caused it, as that was the only change I remember making. That was weird, too, though- Monday, I went to use Inkscape and it was gone. Not in menus, not anywhere. That’s why I reinstalled.

Although I was annoyed with this turn of events, I was not nearly as frustrated I have been in the past when the gui breaks or other random things happen. I am comfortable enough in the command line now to at least back up my files, and I have home on its own partition. And since there are no annoying license issues with Ubuntu (unlike windows, which I always lose the key for) reinstalling is easy.