Has it been 6 months already? Time flies when you are having fun or when you are very busy, it seems. The Dutch and English announcements can be found on the official Ubuntu wiki as well as the Dutch and English release notes. Another great upgrade, loaded with new stuff and changes. Here are some tips to get you through the potentially “rough” part of it

Fast upgrade

I gave a friend of mine a great tip. That tip enabled him to upgrade his system in less than an hour and downloading the updates took less than 10 minutes (at about 1.6 MB/s). I told him that the default is to use the official nl.archive.ubuntu.com as an update source and he should use an alternate local mirror if the main one is slow. Just add a line to your /etc/hosts :

ip.of.the.alternate.mirror nl.archive.ubuntu.com

Do not forget to undo this after the upgrade though

GNOME-RDP

Apparently the GNOME-RDP database “breaks” again if you upgrade. This bugreport also contained the “fix” (by Mick K), but make sure sqlite and sqlite3 are installed:

sudo apt-get install sqlite sqlite3
cp ~/.gnome-rdp.db ~/.gnome-rdp.db.backup
mv ~/.gnome-rdp.db ~/.gnome-rdp.db.old
# Open GNOME-RDP to create and initialize a new database and then close the application:
gnome-rdp
sqlite ~/.gnome-rdp.db.old “.dump session” | fgrep INSERT | sqlite3 ~/.gnome-rdp.db
# Keyring support slows it down a lot (and produces errors) so disable it:
sqlite3 ~/.gnome-rdp.db “INSERT INTO appOptions VALUES(‘UseKeyring’,'False’);”

Note: please keep your backup file in place (an extra backup is never a bad thing), since GNOME-RDP seems to have database issues when upgrading. I can not ensure this is ‘the’ best way to fix your current database, so use with caution.

Compiz and Intel

I suddenly found myself unable to enable compiz (“Blacklisted PCIID ’8086:2a02′ found”). After a quick Launchpad error search I found this bug which referenced the Dell site, which eventually contained the workaround. Just edit /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager and add the following line:

SKIP_CHECKS=”yes”

CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE

I really do NOT get this. This shortcut was disabled because some people accidentally triggered it and this restarts X. Which idiot accidentally presses CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE? Anyway, this is how you get the famous shortcut back and working as intended:

sudo dontzap –disable