Today morning, I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Herd 5. Actually, Herd 5 was released a week ago. The only thing made me wait is to run vmware-player. In Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, everything has been working almost perfect for me including built-in soundcard of BenQ Joybook S52 which I had built additional package with a small patch to alsa. Anyway, I would like to try Feisty Fawn early by the way.

Upgrading from Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn was pretty easy. All I had to do are as follows.

1. Update all packages.

   $ sudo apt-get update
   $ sudo apt-get upgrade

2. Comment out all additional repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list to prevent conflict.

3. Change all references in /etc/apt/sources.list from edgy to feisty.

4. Upgrade distribution.

   $ sudo apt-get update
   $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

5. Reconfigure X.org.

   $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

6. Reboot.

Noticeable changes I found are listed below.

1. alsa-modules is 1.0.14rc1 which means BenQ Joybook S52 should work seamlessly. My soundcard works with no more tweak.
2. NetworkManager has a new context menu for bringing up static network configuration by 2 clicks.
3. The artwork of GDM has changed to display bigger text.
4. Wireless network has been detected and connected automatically. My wireless card is IPW2200.
5. OpenOffice.org 2.2 is available at my fingers. I don't know how it improved but I will know very soon.

6. kqemu-source is available so installing kqemu is as simple as follows.

   $ sudo module-assistant build kqemu
   sudo module-assistant install kqemu

7. Metacity provides more options for controlling visibility of each window in several workspaces.

8. Hardware Information is in System -> Preferences.
9. pango in Firefox is working so great.

If I find more changes, I will let you know later. Note that vmware-player and its neighbor are able to run on Feisty Fawn with a small patch. You don't need to do it yourself. Instead, let this wrapper script do it automatically.

Tags: ubuntu, feisty fawn, herd 5