I’ve been a little disappointed with Gutsy Gibbon, the latest release of Ubuntu. I’m not sure if it’s the older hardware I’m running, but things seem a little flakier. For starters, the upgrade process locked up about 1/3 of the way through. And this time I wasn’t working on the computer at the same time.

When I rebooted, I got to the Gnome login screen and logged in, but it didn’t go any further than that. I was able to set things so I could log in to a terminal instead, and I continued the installation using dpkg --configure -a (I think). That seems to have completed the process, but now I’ve got several lingering problems that I didn’t have with Feisty.

First, my ThinkPad X23 doesn’t resume out of suspend anymore. The fans and hard drive start spinning, the LCD backlights flash on and then off, but the “moon” light just blinks and blinks and blinks. I tend to use suspend regularly whenever I shut the screen, so this is totally cramping my style. Googling around reveals that I’m not alone (and that it might be a problem with the kernel—I’m running 2.6.22-14-generic), but the suggested fixes I tried had no effect.

Occasionally when I login, I can’t click on anything. I can move the mouse cursor, but I can’t do anything with it. I’m not sure if this is because I’m clicking on the Firefox icon in the top panel too quickly or not, but pretty much all I can do when this happens is Ctrl+Alt+Bksp and re-login. This has occurred 3-4 times.

Selecting justified text in Firefox (e.g. in my blog) makes the text wiggle back and forth by a pixel or two. WTF? I’m wondering if these issues are all Gnome 2.20 related? Here’s a screencast I took to illustrate what I’m talking about:

Finally the Live Comment Preview plugin I use for displaying comments as they’re typed delays the appearance of the characters I’m typing so drastically that composing that way is not usable.