After burning the DVD, I noticed the cdromupgrade script on the DVD, and decided to run it, instead of the normal aptitude dist-upgrade. A couple of clicks and one hour later, my system was upgraded to Feisty Fawn. Such simplicity -- I thought -- it can't be this easy! Yet it was. In a way.
Unfortunately the reboot failed. It would come to the boot screen and simply hang. Turns out, I had installed a custom kernel in Edgy, which was also set to be the default. This was simple to solve. Just select the Feisty kernel in the grub boot menu, and later reconfigure the previous kernel, dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-old, and it booted fine. I guess upstart's not really working well with the old kernel's initrd. Boot time is now 45s, down from 55s for Edgy.
The nv driver, as I mentioned in an earlier post, works perfectly. The coolest feature about X.org 7.2, is its ability to run without a xorg.conf file. Just remove the xorg.conf file, and see it run perfectly! It did, for me, atleast. I did have problems with the scrolling on the touchpad, but that was easy to fix, just add options psmouse proto=exps to /etc/modprobe.d/options.
Unfortunately, there were two regressions. The most evident, and a show-stopper for my laptop was support for the headphone jack. Unlike Edgy, where it wasn't even recognized, and I had to install the latest ALSA, in Feisty, both speakers and headphones work, but have a single volume control. Unfortunately the speakers aren't muted when I plug in my headphones. Incredibly annoying, as my labmates will testify, as I blasted
The second regression was Suspend/Hibernate. I use Suspend rarely, and it used to work beautifully in Edgy. Unfortunately it's broken in Feisty. I first thought it was a problem with nv, but the nvidia driver has the same problems. Also it turned out that my forced shutdowns ended up in me corrupting the root filesystem. Ouch.
Recover or re-install? Well, I always wanted to re-install Feisty (just for kicks), and here was the opportunity. So I wiped the root partition, and re-installed Feisty. Took about another hour, and I'm still re-installing apps -- but thanks to aptitude that's not much of a pain. All of my settings and data were not affected -- thanks to the good fortune of having a separate /home partition. What is a painful is that main in Feisty does not fit on the DVD, and you'll need the web repositories too. Irritating.
After all of this, what's Feisty worth to you? If you're using Edgy on a laptop and it's working, I recommend you continue. However, Feisty's GNOME feels much faster and lighter (and is too!), and having the latest and greatest applications always feels good. As I said, fun, but not relaxing. It works, but keep your fingers crossed!
What's really different about this install is the amount of software I had to add to make it all work. For Feisty, only ALSA. For Edgy, I had to do ALSA, ndiswrapper, network-manager, and some other stuff I've forgotten. So, this is progress. Two steps forward and one step backward, but progess nevertheless. Now to wait for the Gutsy Gibbon.
Update: May 7, 2007 Monty is my hero! Here are the options to add to the screen section in xorg.conf to get beryl working:
Options "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Options "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
