Today I downloaded and installed 10.10 "default" edition (64-bit) on to my vintage desktop and on to my laptop.
The vintage desktop refused to operate the "3D" version of the Ubuntu "unity" graphical shell, owing to the fact that I have affixed thereto two monitors (one in portrait, one in landscape) and the combined size exceeded its fixed buffer allowance (2K pixels square). So I switched to the 2D version and everything was fine. Encouraged, I installed on my laptop, where all had been fine (even with "unity") under 10.4. But. Horrors. No whatsits on the left, no response from the thingies in the top bar (that used to be the panel and now isn't), no UI to reboot and no network. I rebooted into 2D and things were only slightly better: I did have my whatsits and some (but not all) of the thingies I ought to have. After much digging I got the network going (had to fiddle with uninstalling the wifi driver, rfkill unblock and then reinstall the wifi driver); but many ugly things remained, such as no icons for some of the whatsits on the doodah. A reboot found the network fully functional but the network indicator app firmly telling me that no network devices were available. And still no UI to reboot. So I decided to install the package gnome-shell, which offers both Gnome 3 and Gnome 2. All kinds of libraries got uninstalled, rather to my surprise, when I did this; and since then nearly everything works. I have Gnome 3, Gnome 2 and Unity all working peaceably together and the network indicator cured of its previous insanity. Some of my apps aren't very enthusiastic about running under the new shells; I will report if things improve after later updates. Meanwhile, if you haven't yet upgraded, my advice is don't rush. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-11-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
