Main­tain­ing a record for the next time I for­mat my com­puter and upgrade.

With a lot of curi­ousity, a dash of ner­vous­ness and a scoop of anx­i­ety I’ve finally upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to the new 11.04. My ini­tial impres­sion of Unity is fairly good: I really appre­ci­ate the max­i­mum uti­liza­tion of screen space, even if I have a 15″ lap­top. There is a slight jerk­i­ness to the effects that I don’t like–perhaps upgrad­ing to pro­pri­etary dri­vers will resolve that prob­lem.  Being a gnome fan, I’ve started installing gnome 3’s shell [1].

As I wait, I’ve mod­i­fied the key­board set­tings to my par­tic­u­lar favourites:

• Swap­ping the escape and cap­slock keys: very very use­ful and fin­ger friendly for VIM users.
• Set­ting Ctrl+‘ to launch a new ter­mi­nal. I find a single-handed key com­bi­na­tion for launch­ing a ter­mi­nal as extra­or­di­nar­ily useful.

Set­ting up empa­thy for my Face­book and Google accounts: as I use 2-step authen­ti­ca­tion, I must gen­er­ate a new appli­ca­tion spe­cific pass­word for gmail on empa­thy. Empathy’s inte­gra­tion within Unity is fairly impres­sive: I par­tic­u­larly liked the icon shak­ing slightly when I was pinged and the chat win­dow was out of focus. After, that I set up Face­book for my broad­cast account: twit­ter can wait till after I’m done with my self-imposed exile from cer­tain websites.

Up next is installing my data card’s soft­ware: some­thing I prob­a­bly won’t be doing in a cou­ple of months, but is still use­ful [2]: as I have a saved copy of my orig­i­nal wvdial.conf, I get this done fairly simply.

Gnome 3 installs nor­mally, but switch­ing to gnome 3 has some very unex­pected results–frankly, I felt that my lap­top was bro­ken. I had for­got­ten to do a dist-upgrade, which seems to be essen­tial, fol­lowed by the steps out­lined in [5]. Chang­ing the theme to the default gnome 3 and remov­ing the acces­si­bil­ity theme, dis­abling ATI’s pro­pri­etary dri­vers as well as chang­ing the gtk theme to adwaita finally brought my desk­top to resem­ble the screen­shots on gnome3.org. Finally, I heave a sigh of relief and get down to get­ting my work­sta­tion ready.

I need Vim for any­thing and every­thing: I restore my .gvimrc and .vimrc; copy­ing cer­tain use­ful plu­g­ins (sur­round and Lusty-Explorer). [8]

I must haz Music! Ubuntu restricted extras comes to my res­cue here. [6]

With a slightly decent net con­nec­tion, I move on to get­ting some essen­tial soft­ware that I can use with­out hav­ing to build from source:

• Adobe Flash [3]
• Git, git-svn
• Filezilla (ftp)
• Apache2, php5, php5-curl
• mysql-server, mysql-client
• google-chrome
• texlive, texlive-font-extras, and var­i­ous other tex pack­ages [7]

Once I com­pleted my instal­la­tion and started work, I real­ized that while Gnome 3 looked rel­a­tively attrac­tive, it really slowed down my work flow apart from being fairly unsta­ble and slow on my lap­top. Decid­ing to switch back to either Unity or the Gnome 2 fall­back, I fol­lowed one of the var­i­ous purge ppa: instruc­tions avail­able on the internet.

To cut a long story short, I ended up refor­mat­ting and rein­stalling every­thing again apart from los­ing some vec­tor dia­grams I had pre­pared (thank­fully I had the raster vesions saved as I had emailed a copy of the .png file around). Next time around, I just might move to Debian.

I found [9] par­tic­u­larly use­ful in get­ting Unity cus­tomized to suit my needs. Finally allowed to use ATI’s pro­pri­etary dri­vers, I also man­aged to play both Cogs, Ham­mer­fight and Steel­Storm from the new Hum­ble Bun­dle [10] on my laptop!

After a few days of work­ing using Unity, I’m afraid I was dis­ap­pointed again–Unity too is nowhere near as sta­ble as I had hoped for. Some of the prob­lems I expe­ri­enced  included the lap­top going to sleep and not wak­ing up at all, flick­er­ing and the work­spaces sud­denly rear­rang­ing them­selves, and var­i­ous mis­cel­la­neous sim­i­lar problems.

So again, I needed to move. While con­sid­er­ing to move to Debian, and for­sak­ing Ubuntu alto­gether, I didn’t have the sta­mina to re-set up my lap­top. I decided to install the pack­age xubuntu-desktop over my exist­ing setup, and switched to Xubuntu’s ses­sion: which is finally work­ing well. Three cheers for XFCE!

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/22946/how-do-i-install-the-latest-version-of-gnome-3
[2] http://kunal-b.in/2010/01/reliance-zteonda-on-linux/
[3] http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
[4] http://www.vim.org/download.php
[5] http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-fix-common-gnome-3-issues-on-ubuntu-11–04-natty.html
[6] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats
[7] http://www.ctan.org/
[8] https://github.com/kunalb/Vim-Configuration
[9] http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/04/12-things-i-did-after-installing-new.html
[10] http://www.humblebundle.com

This post has been moved to my new blog related to more tech­ni­cal stuff at http://explog.in/notes/formstyling.html .