Monday, June 05, 2006

Ubuntu Dapper Drake Upgrade

With Ubuntu Dapper Drake being released on the 1st of June I decided to upgrade my work desktop machine today. I just edited my sources.list file and then ran apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. Most of the upgrade went fine, but here are a few things that other people may fin helpful were. nVidia Monitor Detection It seems that the new nVidia driver was autodetecting that my monitor could do 76Hz vertical refresh rate at 1280x1024. Not while it can display this it didn't seem to be able to adjust the screen enough and as a result I was unable to see the two left most columns of pixels. I attempted to fix the vertical refresh rate in my configuration file ( /etc/X11/xorg.conf ) by setting the line VerticalRefresh 50-60 but every time I started X up it would continue to use 76Hz which was outside the range. After quite a bit of Googling I discovered that the nvidia driver attempts to autodetect the monitor settings by default and the way to turn it off is to add an option to the file: Section "Device"   Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x]"   Driver "nvidia"   Option "UseEdidFreqs" "false" EndSection Pinned Rhythmbox Somehow rhythmbox was pinned in the Synaptic Package Manager, this didn't seem to be affecting apt-get which was upgrading it without any problems. The problem turned out to be that synaptic can have its own list of pinned applications which are stored in /usr/lib/synaptic/preferences. As this only entry in this file was the pinning of rhythmbox I deleted the file and everything worked fine. Packaged Java Ubuntu now packages the Sun JDK which can be install just like any other package. I had a problem though in that all my alternatives (/etc/alternatives) were pointing to the wrong versions. I found a good post on galternatives that allows you to easily edit them.

1 comment:

Matthew Buckett said...

For some reason Firefox on Breezy always seemed much slower and I always ended up downloading a standard Firefox build. Dapper does seem snappier overall though.