Peter’s Soapbox

It’s Time To Be Lucid

Yesterday, while fiddling with my eeePC and attempting to install Crunchbang on an SD card, I accidentally nuked my GRUB config. Note to self: GRUB and GRUB2 = Oil and water. I started to look at the process of repairing the dreaded GRUB error 21, and then decided that this was a good opportunity to just try Lucid Lynx alpha 1. After all, I have a separate /home partition and my machine was already not booting, so what did I have to lose? I think this decision was, not unlike my cold-medicine-induced decision to install Fedora last year, somewhat influenced by my consumption of 9 espressos which I made from my new espresso pot.

The first boot had me a bit nervous, as, instead of a login screen, I was presented with a bunch of squiggly lines, indicating that the screen resolution on my netbook was horribly wrong. Fortunately, a simple reboot fixed this, and I got the expected login screen on the next attempt.

Installation went smoothly, and most of my settings were preserved just fine. I did have to re-enter my WPA keys, but other than that, things were pretty much as I expected. One oddity is that I need to associated with my wireless network every time I resume or reboot. I don’t have to re-enter the WPA key, but I do have to say “connect to this network” each time. I’m not sure if this is a bug or a power-saving or security feature.

Update: This was fixed by my checking the “Connect automatically” option under the wireless network’s properties. Apparently this is new, as when I reinstalled Karmic Koala, the box was checked by default.

For the first time that I can recall, an alpha release of Ubuntu has started up without greeting me with a friendly “GNOME Crash Recovery” window, which is nice. I always wondered how GNOME could start out by recovering from a crash, even on its very first run.

As with Karmic, Ubuntu was nice enough to inform me that my battery “may be old or broken,” as it has a low capacity. I’m still waiting on the replacement to arrive.

Another glitch I encountered was the screen spontaneously going white. This has happened only once, but if it happens again, I’ll file a bug report.

Watch this space for updates on my experiences being lucid.