Gutsy on thinkpad Z60

Gutsy Gibbon is stated to be released on 18th October. I was using beta version of  GG for more than a month and decided to try out the relese candidate 3.

The live CD booted smoothly and came up with minimal desktop effects. Not too bling, but just to show what it can do. Both of my network cards were detected properly and the X-server set the proper resolution of 1280×800 Hurrah !!!!

But, the installation hanged at 22% with the error message ”Could not copy files from CD”. I re-checked the CD for errors and found none. Just cleaned the CD a bit and re-booted and this time the installation went smoothly. Installed on a separate partition and within 40 minutes, my new shiny Gutsy was ready for use.

Some of the changes, so subtle was interesting as well.

1. This is the first Ubuntu which comes with compiz as default. But, this is slightly mis-leading as I explain later.

2. The gnome-settings is now integrated. You can change all the appearances and desktop-effects from a single application.

3. First tried restricted manager to install ATI drivers and enable desktop effects. But, alas NO desktop effects. It gave error saying the currecnt driver is not in the whitelist and XGL is not available either. I was shocked as desktop effects worked like a charm in the live CD version.

Little googling told me that, though compiz is default, to be on the safer side, it is disabled unless the free drivers for ATI, nVIDIA etc is used. Though the new restricted manager informs you the availability of a better but not-open source driver available, installing it disables desktop effects :(

Removed restricted driver, went back to the free driver and my laptop is very happy to give me basic desktop effects

4. Be prepared to see increased CPU activity for an hour or so, even though you are not running any memory

intensive programs. The culprit is trackerd indexing. The new trackerd uses tags to index.

5. The password prompt for sudo now prefixes the user name to it.

Okay, thats all I got from my first two hours of Gutsy, not go back to work and play ..

Ubuntu resolv.conf overwriting

The dhcp servers always may not be properly setup to pass on the correct information about the dns and domain names to the clients. Or, you might want to add your own info. But, the modifications made to /etc/resolv.conf are last after rebooting or when the next time the dhcp client contacts the server.

To retain the changes over reboot (restarting of network), you can edit /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf instead of resolv.conf

Use sudo to open the file,

sudo vim /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf 

Edit the following two lines to read as

supersede domain-name “mydomain.com”;
prepend domain-name-servers 192.168.1.1