Well, you guys know me – I’m a big procrastinator, but I finally upgraded my laptop to 7.04. This is pretty ironic with the forthcoming release of Gutsy, but hey, I’m usually late to the party.
So, I was happily running 6.06 on my Dell Inspiron 5150 and decided to upgrade for really no good reason. The cd-rom drive in my laptop is a little wonky so I was planning on using an external drive and doing a fresh install. At the last minute I opted for the net upgrade instead – a risky procedure – upgrades never go well.
Well for the most part, it did go well. I did the net upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10 and then again to 7.04. I had two issues, one of which is resolved. I couldn’t get the zippy desktop effects to work and it had to do with the libGl libraries. I symlinked to the previous versions and all was good. Also had to put in some stuff in my xorg.conf, but now I have those cool desktop effects. You can see what I changed here:
supertom@supertom-laptop:~$ ls -l /usr/lib/libGL*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2007-08-26 22:21 /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1 -> libGLcore.so.1.0.9631
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 8961220 2007-06-25 14:33 /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1.0.9631
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9916028 2007-02-26 17:21 /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1.0.9746
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2007-08-26 07:30 /usr/lib/libGLEW.so.1.3 -> libGLEW.so.1.3.4
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 199848 2007-03-04 21:16 /usr/lib/libGLEW.so.1.3.4
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 653 2007-02-26 17:22 /usr/lib/libGL.la
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-02-26 17:22 /usr/lib/libGL.so -> libGL.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 2007-08-26 22:31 /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 -> /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.0.9631
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 567704 2007-06-25 14:33 /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.0.9631
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 601272 2007-02-26 17:21 /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.0.9746
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2007-08-26 07:30 /usr/lib/libGLU.so.1 -> libGLU.so.1.3.060502
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 521000 2007-07-13 05:23 /usr/lib/libGLU.so.1.3.060502
Unfortunately, my Netgear WG511 stopped working with WPA and I have tried unsuccessfully to fix it so far. I had originally followed the instructions on linuxquestions.org for Dapper but no luck on 7.04. I blacklisted what I believe to be the appropriate drivers and tried different windows drivers under ndiswrappers with no luck. Works fine with WEP. I have a wireless USB adapter which I might give a shot or I might just break down and buy something better supported. This laptop is now 3+ years old, but, other than a cdrom issue (meaning, it doesn’t always work) it works fine, so it would be nice to keep it around, you know?