I knew that the “Gutsy Gibbon” upgrade for Ubuntu Linux was sometime this month. It’s fairly easy to know when to expect an upgrade: Add six months since the last release. Feisty Fawn was 7.04, so that would make the next release, Gutsy Gibbon, get a release sometime in October (7.10).

Turns out, Gutsy FINAL isn’t due out until October 18th, but they’ve released a “Release Candidate” version that’s probably going to be the final version baring any major fuckmuppetry. Since the command to upgrade was LITERALLY one line of short code, I figured “What the hell? What’s the worst that can happen now that my data is in its own partition anyway?”

Or, maybe I just hate myself and wanted a problem to fix.

Anyway, the upgrade commenced as planned for an hour or so, then it started to throw up all sorts of errors relating to my video card drivers. Crap. I had installed some third party drivers, but the release wanted to remove them and found them broken somehow. It suggested I file a bug report about not being able to uninstall what it wanted. The final warning it gave me was rather ominous, “This upgrade may leave your system in an unusable state.”

Oh crap.

My pictures are well backed up, and I’ve got my data separate from my architecture, so in theory, if worst came to worse, I could just reinstall and not lose any data. Oh well, let’s see what happens when I reboot.

The computer started, but the graphics weren’t the proper resolution. It was in “Safe Mode”, and the title bar of all my windows had disappeared. I couldn’t close, resize, or move anything. A quick search of the Ubuntu Forums fixed that problem rather easily. I switched from Compiz Fusion handling my windows back to Gnome’s Metacity. I’ve lost my eyecandy for the moment, but I’ll find some tutorial somewhere eventually. The point is now my system was no longer “unusable”, but slightly less pretty for a bit. Someone’s got to help me find more Emerald themes to make Compiz Fusion pretty again.

I added the “fast user switching” to my menu. This is probably the most useful new feature I’ve discovered at the moment. Now my wife can quickly log into her account. I also had her default language change to Korean, which should make her more comfortable in front of the computer, but make my life hell if I have to dig out any information from her menu.  I’m still the user that can make and delete accounts, so if worse comes to worse I’ll try setting it back to English or make a new one if I must fiddle with her stuff in the future.

Things still seem to be working relatively well. There might be some hidden glitches here and there that might get fixed when the final version is released next week, but it was a good enough upgrade for me that I didn’t need to reformat.