ubuntu 13.10
i upgraded to 13.10 this past weekend. upgrade went fine with no problems. my thoughts on new distribution releases are a lot less exciting than in the past. nowadays i’m mostly looking to make sure my productivity apps still function after an upgrade. in other words, okay i’ve upgraded…now what’s broken? and i don’t mean that as a slight against canonical, there’s simply a lot of big developments in the linux space lately. a lot of major frameworks being changed out for new ones…so older apps simply break.
on first boot i noticed a lot of errors regarding “…/freedesktop/hal/udev_event…” which appears to happen if the deprecated package “hal” is installed. i chose to remove hal and had to uninstall gnome-device-manager (which no longer appears to function anyways) and thoggen (a shame because i thought this was a good app). the errors disappeared afterwards.
audacious has a new last.fm scrobbler plugin which doesn’t seem to work for me. i’ve fallen back on using banshee for playing music now. also i’ve had banshee crash suddenly when plugging in USB storage.
*the audacious scrobbler problem is potentially a last.fm certificate issue. it appears the current workaround is to build the plugin against libcurl4-openssl instead of libcurl4-gnutls. i’m willing to wait a few weeks to see if the issue gets sorted out, if not i’ll look into building the plugin* **i was too lazy to build the plugin myself, but luckily a nice last.fm user posted a rebuilt plugin for i386 and amd64 architectures, link: http://www.last.fm/group/Audacious/shoutbox. i placed the file scrobbler.so in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/audacious/General**
i’ve had one hard freeze happen (pretty unusual for linux)…not sure what the cause was but i could not access any of the auxiliary consoles to terminate processes and had to hard poweroff.
the battery indicator applet seems to be functional again in this release which is good news.
in chromium it appears that some of the extensions are no longer functioning properly even though they show as installed and enabled. i’ve tried removing/reinstalling without success. *this is a confirmed bug with chromium 29 in ubuntu 13.10…i imagine it will get fixed w/ future updates* **fixed in chromium upgrade package 11/4/2013**
really awesome is that on a dell latitude e6510 sleep mode finally works properly when closing the laptop’s lid. i don’t think that ever worked properly on previous ubuntu releases.