My experience upgrading UNE 10.04 to Maverick (and yours!)
As you might know, Ubuntu version for netbooks, UNE, is having a major re-engineering work for Maverick Meerkat, soon to be Ubuntu 10.10. The old interface, which included packages like netbook-launcher or maximus, is going to be replaced by Unity. If you don’t know what Unity is, the nice people behing OMGubuntu published some days ago a nice review of the brand new UNE interface.
I will give you a clue: it does look very different from what you’re used to. That’s why we want to collect as many reports as possible of people upgrading from UNE 10.04 to 10.10 (with Unity).
My experience upgrading
OK, I don’t want to ask people to test something if I haven’t (and I have the means for it). I took my Dell Mini 9 (well, technically is Canonical’s, but, anyway) and I installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04.1 in Spanish. The installation went very well and fast.
After reboot, I updated my 10.04 installation and started the upgrade to Unity. Although the upgrade itself did not have any major problems it took almost six hours! Of course, I reported this as bug 646638. I talked with Michael Vogt on IRC and he will investigate.
Once the upgrade finished everything worked as expected: the language was still Spanish and there were no major crashes. Nevertheless, the global menu stayed there with “File Editar” even when no applications were running. I filed that as bug 646890 in Unity.
Apart from that, I found a couple of bugs in the Dash, but unrelated with the upgrade itself. These are bugs 646758 and 646756.
Your experiences upgrading
My system is not a real system. I use the Dell Mini 9 with SSD 8GB for testing purposes. I don’t use it on a daily basis. I reinstall almost every flavour of Ubuntu on it every milestone. My upgrade experience was from a nice, cleaned, UNE 10.04 to 10.10. No PPAs or third party software installed.
That’s why we need real feedback from the people that often use UNE 10.04 on their upgrades to 10.10. If you want to participate in our testing effort, just follow the next steps:
- Create an account in our tracker
- Upgrade to Maverick
- Report back!
Use my testing report as an example. You see that you can add comments (like the system you used,or general impressions) and, of course, add bug numbers if you encounter any.
Thanks and happy testing!
Let's test Ubuntu NOW! 
I could start a flamewar by saying I prefer GNOME Shell with Maximus. :->
regeya
September 24, 2010 at 5:10 pm
[…] you would like an example, please check out Ara Pulido’s upgrade experience […]
Upgrade Testing of UNE 10.04 to Maverick’s Unity « Marjo Mercado's Blog
September 24, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Interesting post, I will create a tutorial on upgrading Ubuntu at ubuntuvideotutorials.org for October 10th if I can. How do you like it compared to UNE? Also how is the performance on the mini 9?
technologyunit
September 24, 2010 at 10:20 pm
I’ve just upgraded to Maverick on my HP Mini 5102. It didn’t go too well although I’m up and running now. I’ll continue to test and report back through the QA Tracker.
I’ll also post on my blog: http://martinwebster.info/2010/09/24/ubuntu-unity-on-maverick-meerkat-10-10/.
Martin Webster
September 25, 2010 at 8:54 am
Just tested 10.10 netbook on my 10.1 screen netbook which came with Windows 7 starter edition. And I’m staying with Windows.
Maverick Meerkat 10.10 netbook version is simply horrible !
Terrible UI for any screen under 13 inches. The concept is towards a touch screen but it still will not be good for a small screen. I realize it’s still being tested but my mouse froze twice and I had to do a hard shut down. Wifi connected perfectly, but my indicator light kept blinking on and off. It did not however affect me losing the signal. Anyway I kept it on my netbook all of about 15 minutes. At this point I’m done with Ubuntu. If I ever go to a Linux distro again it will be with Linux Mint. I don’t know why I keep thinking there is something better out there then Windows, and Windows 7 rocks, even the limited starter edition is far better then a full fledge Linux desktop. Security issues have never been an issue for me in Windows.
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The problem as I see it, are far to many hands in the mix in regards to development and the thought pattern that try’s to be so different from a Windows or even a Mac OS. Ubuntu was never a learning curve for me and it always worked out of the box for me, it’s the User Interface especially in the netbook editions that leads me back to Windows. And in my opinion 9.10 was the better version. (netbook remix)
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The bigger complaint for me with any Linux is a simple restore like Windows has. On average I restore my system once a week, because I tend to mess things up. Thank who ever, I loaded 10.10 in the virtual..
JWR
September 25, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Well such is the nature of beta quality products on there first release. I have to say that If for some reason graphical effects are disabled you will feel the pain of freezes. I attempted to test it in a VM and was unable to get it to run smoothly. I do see it as a great option for netbooks because it takes advantage of the extra wide screen so you can optimize the horizontal space. I do admit that it will probably take until Natty before it gains much popularity. I would be interesting to run it on a touch screen but it is definitely not optimized. JWR please don’t complain about things that are one free and two developed by people who aren’t really getting payed, especially for you reasons. These people devote hundreds of hours of work on a project they are receiving little to no money for. Of course if you had some constructive criticism that would be another story entirely.
technologyunit
September 28, 2010 at 1:10 am
-Once you use compiz in your system, every other system without it just does not feel right. That happened to me with unity, I simply don’t feel comfortable without desktop effects.
-Adding a custom launcher is way too complicated, I have already created customs launchers with alacarte, but they simply don’t show up in unity interface to be able to be run from it, and then pinned.
-I need the date in the panel, and there is no way to add it, if previously GNOME designers were criticized as Interface Nazis, th Unity panel “configurability” is just a way in that directions.
Miguel
September 28, 2010 at 4:18 am
Everything works very well based on only a year of Ubuntu netbook products. My only problem is Java applications; they become all grey when maximized (freemind, netbeans), menu missing (rssowl). I think it’s Java + Java framework bugs. [UNE 10.10 on Ideapad s3-10t]
songrit
October 19, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Unity is really aweful – sidedock takes up vertical space, causing a vert scroll bar on most webpages; uses some unconventional paradigms with respect to desktop/window management; the side dock is stuttery, and kind of ugly, along with many other problems…
I simply logged out, logged in with the “Desktop” GNOME session, nuked the bottom panel (adding the window list to the top), added the AWN dock to the bottom with launchers/applets and installed/added “maximus” to the startup apps to get the “titlebar in panel” (but not menu – that’s obnoxious) functionality back from UNR 10.04. Fixed 🙂
Boo Radley
October 20, 2010 at 7:41 pm