As some of you may know, today (April 24^th) marked the release of Ubuntu version 8.04, code named Hardy Heron. This release is a Long Term Support release, meaning that it will be supported with security updates through 2011.

My upgrade to Hardy from Ubuntu’s previous version (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) has not gone as smoothly as I had hoped. To kick things off, by the time I was ready to start the upgrade, all of the Canadian repository mirrors I tried were being hammered with download requests. It would have taken me upwards of 15 hours to download the necessary updates via this means. Instead, I downloaded one of the install discs via BitTorrent, and upgraded from there.

The following is a list of issues that I have had or am still having, with links to the relevant forum posts if applicable. I will try to keep this list up to date. Note that everything on this list is bad; the green entries are just the least problematic. Items that have been stricken through are those that I have now fixed.

• When booting, I am forced to log in from the GDM twice
• Fonts in Firefox 3.0 are too narrow
• Many of my common Firefox extensions are not yet available for the 3.0 branch
• The forward and back buttons on my mouse work in neither Firefox nor Nautilus
• When opening a folder with previewable material, Nautilus re-analyzes every file even if thumbnails have already been calculated (Launchpad bug 221577)
• Media player keys no longer work with Sonata
• Firefox 3.0 location bar is a detriment to productivity
• Pidgin 2.4.1 does not allow re-sizing of the compose area in conversation windows
• Sonata notification area icon not displayed properly (Launchpad bugs 210384 and 222014)
• MPD consumes 25% of CPU during playback of any file (Launchpad bug 221951)
• AWN clock applet has memory leak (1.6GB for a clock after 10 hours) (Ubuntu forums thread)
• PulseAudio server is in user-space and gets killed with X (Ubuntu forums thread)
• VLC uses 30% CPU when outputting sound to PulseAudio (Launchpad bug 232297; Ubuntu forums thread)

Specifics

This is a list of fixes to the above problems and their relative merits.

GDM Double Login

A series of software updates for GDM were released a couple weeks ago, and the problem seems to have disappeared after updating.

Firefox 3.0 Fonts Too Narrow

This is still a problem on my desktop, however it appears that it is being caused by some existing configuration settings left-over from Gutsy. I did a clean Hardy install on my laptop, and the fonts in Firefox look fine.

Update: I’ve been messing around with fonts and seem to have come to a decent compromise, although I couldn’t recount how I achieved this.

Firefox 3.0 Extensions / Add-ons

This isn’t technically a fix, it’s a hack.. I added a key to the Firefox about:config that disabled the compatibility check for add-ons, allowing those designed for previous versions to run on 3.0.

Firefox 3.0 Forward / Back Buttons

It turns out this was a deeper problem with my mouse. I have since converted to using btnx (Ubuntu forums thread) to control mouse buttons. This is a very slick program, and works amazingly well with my MX Revolution.

Multimedia Keys with Sonata

Thanks to PaulK for this one. In /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sonata.py, around lines 74-75, the Gnome dbus interface has changed. Was:

settingsDaemonObj = bus.get_object('org.gnome.SettingsDaemon', '/org/gnome/SettingsDaemon')
settingsDaemonInterface = dbus.Interface(settingsDaemonObj, 'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon')

Is now:

settingsDaemonObj = bus.get_object('org.gnome.SettingsDaemon', '/org/gnome/SettingsDaemon/MediaKeys')
settingsDaemonInterface = dbus.Interface(settingsDaemonObj, 'org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.MediaKeys')

Firefox 3.0 Location Bar

I used some changes to the userChrome.css file to modify the way the location bar looks. Just a few basic adjustments has already improved how it looks. I will continue tweaking this, but I think this is a sufficient means to improve the functionality (for me at least).

Pidgin 2.4.1 Compose Area

It has been made fairly clear in Pidgin support ticket 4986 that the developers have absolutely no interest in changing this behaviour back, nor of adding the option to disable the automatic resizing of the compose area. While it bothers me, I don’t think I am prepared to go through the hassle and delay times of using a fork just to put the resizing back in. Maybe the fork will become popular..? I doubt it =/

MPD Consumes 25% CPU

1. Install the PulseAudio preferences manager (package `paprefs’); this happened to already be installed in my case
2. In paprefs, under the “Network Access” tab, check the following two options:
   1. Enable network access to local sound devices
   2. Don’t require authentication
3. Add the following to /etc/mpd.conf (replacing any existing audio_output settings):
   audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "{whatever name you want}"
}
4. Restart MPD

Short-term testing of this has yielded a significant improvement (read: the issue appears to be fixed using the above steps). I will continue monitoring it over the next several days and will report back if the issue re-surfaces.

AWN Digital Clock

Apparently AWN changed their package names from Gutsy to Hardy, so I was running an outdated version. I uninstalled the package avant-window-navigator-bzr, version 0.3.1~bzr229.1~gutsy1, along with all of it’s dependents and associated packages. I then installed the package avant-window-navigator-trunk, version 0.3.1~bzr233.1-hardy, along with all of it’s associated packages, and now the memory leak seems to be fixed.