Yesterday I finally was able to install the new Ubuntu 9.04 „Jaunty Jackalope“ using the Update Manager. I’m usually a bit suspicious about new releases of Ubuntu since I always had problems that kept me busy for at least some days. This time, however, I especially looked forward to a faster boot up, because Ubuntu 8.10 booted terribly slowly on my laptop most of the time. So, despite all my fears of a weekend of googling for stuff that stopped working I decided to update to 9.04.
The update itself went well, but as expected, I experienced several issues after starting up my new Ubuntu system. So I decided to make a list of all the things that hassle me at the moment. Some problems were easy to solve, for others I have yet to find a good solution.
1. ATI graphics drivers
Bad news for users of older ATI graphic cards. Several ATI Radeon™ graphic cards were moved to a legacy driver support structure in the new version of the proprietary driver for Linux (Catalyst 9.4). Visit this page at amd.com for more information.
The real problem about this is that the version 9.3 which does support these cards is not compatible with X server 1.6 which is included in the new Ubuntu release. Hopefully AMD will come up with a version that supports older cards and work with X server 1.6. Till then I have to use the Open-source driver radeon.
With the radeon driver I was not able to start Compiz. It keeps saying “No whitelisted driver found”. The good part is that Ubuntu feels much faster without all the eye-candy, I do miss my desktop cube though.
2. Mounting a Sansa Media Player
My Sansa e260 would not mount when plugged in using MSC mode, but I found a good description how to resolve this issue.
3. Tracker index corrupted
Today this dialog suddenly appeared, saying that the Tracker index is corrupted.
OK and Cancel didn’t do anything. The dialog simply reappeared. “Reindex all contents” seemed to cause the Tracker daemon to freeze. There already is a bug filed and an entry in the Jaunty release notes.
This is how I was able to fix this:
- Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)
- Install the package ‘tracker-utils’
$ sudo apt-get install tracker-utils
- Use this command to kill all running Tracker processes and remove all databases
$ tracker-processes -r - And finally restart Tracker daemon and the Tracker applet
$ /usr/lib/tracker/trackerd & tracker-applet & exit
4. VLC: Video is not integrated into the interface
When playing videos in VLC the video is displayed in an own window instead of being integrated into the interface. This feature was apparently disabled because it caused VLC to crash on some systems. You can either use version 0.9.3 or wait until 1.0 is released and in the Jaunty repositories. (Threads in the VideoLAN Forums: [1] [2])