Edgy Eft, Day 3

As discussed previously, over the weekend I took a bit of time and dropped the beta of the latest Ubuntu release – Edgy Eft – onto my production laptop. There were a few minor issues out of the gate, but nothing that could be considered a serious problem. After a couple of days on Edgy, that’s still the case, but there are a few gotchas worth mentioning, and an update on an earlier problem:

• Firefox / Zimbra:
  Got several pieces of feedback on this, both from Zimbra’s Kevin Henrikson in the comments and others with similar experiences and/or feedback, and the net is that the problem preventing the display of Zimbra in Ubuntu’s Firefox is a known one. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the workarounds, so far, are less than compelling. Epiphany suffers from the same problem, Opera isn’t supported by Ubuntu, and my CrossOver based installation of IE 6 delivers Zimbra imperfectly.

  I’m reduced, therefore, to getting mail through Evolution via Zimbra’s IMAP connectivity, which under normal circumstances would be fine. Addicted as I’ve become to Zimbra’s tagging facility, however, this is not ideal. And while I should be able to get access to both mine and my colleagues calendars via iCal APIs, the next problem blows that plan.

• Evolution Data Server:
  A couple of releases ago, the Evolution folks componentized their datastore which was subsequently incorporated into GNOME as a standard library, enabling GNOME componentry like the calendar to have access to your Evolution scheduling information.

  Conceptually, this is a good idea, but I’ve historically had some problems with it; the evolution-data-server component would lock up periodically, taking my GNOME calendar applet with it, which in turn displeased the menu bars triggering all sorts of dire warnings.

  The evolution-data-server-1.8 build in Edgy, however, is even more befitting of the beta term. It errors out upon login, and really throws a tantrum if you try to do anything with it, like accessing your calendar from Evolution or GNOME. If you do that, it just keeps crashing until you eventually give up and restart your machine. For obvious reasons, then, I’m staying away from anything calendar related until I see an update to evolution-data-server come through apt.

• Incomplete Upgrade?:
  While I reported that my upgrade was completed on Saturday morning, I’m no longer sure that was the case. Yesterday when looking to update some minor packages, the Ubuntu Update Manager informed me that an apt-get dist-upgrade was still necessary. Once this was performed, all sorts of other Edgy stuff was installed including new boot splash screens (I know these are better for regular end users than the traditional boot related scrolling text, but they freak me out).

  That was more odd than anything; what was less ideal was the dist-upgrade’s decision to remove both Beagle and Tomboy. I’m not sure about Beagle, but Tomboy AFAIK is part of the default GNOME 2.16 install so I’m not sure what Edgy was doing in removing it. Fortunately, both of these applications reinstalled quickly and easily, with no data loss whatsoever.

• Sound:
  Due in all likelihood to some excessive monkeying on my part, sound on Dapper had been fundamentally broken in that only one application had the ability to access sound at a time; if the browser grabbed sound, podcasts and videos wouldn’t play, and vice versa (yes, I made sure esd was running). Edgy, I’m happy to note, corrected whatever I’d been stupid enough to break.

  Everything appeared to be in perfect working order, with one exception: Skype. While trying to connect with OO.o’s Louis Suarez-Potts this afternoon (which I eventually did on a landline), Skype refused to dial citing a “Problem With Sound Device.” Restarted Skype: same deal. Chalking it up to Edgy’s betaness, I didn’t think much of it. But then I fired up Skype’s open standards counterpart, Gizmo, and it worked just fine – completing a call to Cote with no difficulty whatsoever.

  I checked that a couple of things like alsa-oss were installed, but couldn’t really think of any reason that every sound application – including Gizmo – worked just fine while Skype wouldn’t. So I shut Skype down, then reran it from the command line hoping that on my next failed call I’d at least get some usable output to help diagnose the problem. What happened? My test call to Cote connected, no problem. As of right now, Skype seems to be working like a champ, although I have zero idea as to a.) what was wrong or b.) how it was fixed. Just thought I’d note this in case other Edgy users run into a similar problem.

• Samba:
  I’m not really sure if it was Edgy or some other things I was doing prior to the upgrade, but when I tried to copy an Eels track I downloaded from emusic over to my music server I discovered that my network shares had been broken. To fix this, I just did an apt-get install samba, refreshed the folder and everything was five by five.

So those are the things I’ve found wrong. How about the things that I like in the new release? Well, for one, the new applications are sweet.

• GAIM 2.0:
  Much easier to use – with the exception of the IRC plugin which no longer logs me in automatically – and the sounds are a revelation. Whenever friends or family heard GAIM’s default sounds in the past, they’d look around in alarm fearing an air raid (they were that bad). 2.0’s got a much subtler set of alerts for it, and setting custom availability messages has never been easier.

• Evolution 2.8:
  It’s only borrowing a page from Outlook, but the vertical pane alignment in the latest iteration of 2.8 feels much more usable. Ditto the Cairo enabled overall graphical improvements.

• Firefox 2.0:
  Apart from its inability to render Zimbra properly, I’m really liking the beta of Firefox 2.0. The fonts seem cleaner and better aliased, the extension and theme management is improved, and the Mozilla team has even added a Session Restore function similar to SessionSaver or (in theory, it never works for me) Google BrowserSync.

I haven’t yet given the new Istanbul (screencast recording app) facility yet; my tests with it in the past have yielded videos that crashed Totem and wouldn’t display in VLC. We’ll see how this version does.

In general, however, I remain happy with Edgy and am pleased that I made the decision to upgrade.