Upgrading to Kubuntu Jaunty

Recently finished upgrading my home and work PCs to Jaunty. I must admit I'm pretty impressed with the changes I've seen so far. The upgrade wasn't without hassles though. I used the alternate CD to upgrade (to save on bandwidth) and tested it out on my work PC first. The install script died when it couldn't install a CA-certificate for some or other app. I managed to finish the upgrade by going through a recovery boot from grub, but I had no X. It kept dying when trying to load the nvidia drivers. I tried installing them through apt-get, but that didn't work either, so I left it and went home.

Before I did the home upgrade (I wanted to do it yesterday to use my leftover bandwidth), I first spent time on Google trying to find out about upgrade problems and possible fixes (including how to load and run Envy from the command line). However, the upgrade went through with no hassles. The CA-certificate problem also popped up, but it didn't kill the upgrade script. I had to do two reboots before it worked properly, first time the screen resolution was wrong, with no option to fix it and kded4 was hogging the processor. Rebooting fixed both of those. The second time was to boot into the correct kernel. Then I spent time updating a whole bunch of apps that I use regularly.

I also found that I was running the open source nv driver. At this stage, it's working fine, much better than the nvidia driver that I was using in Intrepid. The fix for my work PC was as simple as changing the driver to nv in xorg.conf.

It really does look much more polished than KDE 4.1. Little things like having the start up tune play through does make me feel happier that someone paid attention to this kind of detail. One thing I really like is that the fonts and the font renderer is so much better.

When I feel up to it, I'll try and get the nvidia drivers to work so I can check out the eye candy.

The upgrade is definitely recommended.