Today I figured I would upgrade my computers to Ubuntu Gutsy. It turned out to be a long day.
Start with the desktop at work…
My xorg.conf was completely destroyed. After about 40 reboots, I finally had my desktop load without going into failsafe mode. Unfortunately, Xinerama support wasn’t working. After some research I learned that Xinerama is no longer supported by the ati drivers. Instead, XRandR is. The great thing about this is it is in the early stages of development and doesn’t support multiple GPU’s, which my work computer has. Needless to say, I am not happy and may install Vista to spite Ubuntu.
Switch to my laptop…
Perfect upgrade. After about 45 minutes, Gutsy was installed and running. No problems at all were encountered.
After today, my recommendation is not to install Gutsy on any dual-monitor setups unless you know it is going to work. On that same note, don’t install Gutsy on any computer with a complex xorg.conf file. It is way too much of a pain to debug to be worth it.
I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but Gutsy dose introduce a GUI for configuring dual display setups that works very well. The actual issue (which hit me also) is that it doesn’t help you when using two or more GPU’s.
If you’ve got two monitors off of one video card, Gutsy loves you. Otherwise, it’s the same boat it’s always been — backup your xorg.conf before upgrading and hope for the best.