Ubuntu 9.10: Karmic Koala

Note: This page is now out-of-date, and preserved for historical interest.

When I upgraded to Karmic, some things broke. Here's what broke, and here's how I fixed it.

The very first thing I noticed was that I was not able to start my beloved window manager xmonad using my .xsession file; the option was conspicuously missing from the set of allowed sessions.

As it turns out, the Gnome developers decided that Xsession should not be an option by default, and that system administrators should manually install a package that adds support for it. Ubuntu, of course, was blithely unaware.

After a lot of experimentation (and a wrong desktop file supplied by Ray Strode), creating the file /usr/share/Xsessions with the following contents fixes the problem:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Xsession
Comment=This runs ~/.xsession
Exec=/etc/X11/Xsession

Because I run a custom .xsession file, a lot of machinery in Gnome was in a half-baked state. The screensaver stopped working after the upgrade; this was identified to be because gnome-settings-manager no longer spawns this process; you'll have to manually load gnome-screensaver. Curses gnome-settings-manager for having some red herring errors that threw me off while debugging.

My power button no longer powered off my laptop. This was fixed by manually finding the power settings and telling it to "power off" when the power button was pressed, instead of asking the user. I have no idea why the dialog was not spawned in the earlier case.

iwl3945 decided to totally crap out on me, and refused to associate with the network using wpa_supplicant. Noting that network manager was managing to associate correctly, I bit the bullet and switched back to using network manager, using stalonetray to store the icon.

As the proud owner of an X61 Thinkpad Tablet, I have a number of scripts set up to give myself auto-rotation when I switch to tablet mode (graciously stolen from this page.) As it turned out, xrandr decided that the default screen should be called LVDS1, instead of LVDS; so those hard-coded values had to be changed.

I use Gnome on my desktop, partially because I've been too lazy to install XMonad, and partially because the mouse pattern of usage is much more natural for what I use my desktop for (checking the weather, checking email, etc.) It looks like a default got turned off from Jaunty to Karmic, namely, the ability to scroll from one desktop to another using your scroll wheel. Well, that won't do: load up "CompizConfig Settings Manager" in Preferences, navigate to "Viewport Switcher", select the "Desktop-based Viewport Switching" tab and use "Button 4" and "Button 5" to re-enable these bindings.

• Xmonad boots up very quickly; much more quickly than xsplash thinks you should. Give xsplash the boot: you can remove it by commenting out the relevant lines in /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default
• Karmic becomes very unhappy if you boot into a non-Karmic kernel. Don't try it.