My Natty Upgrade Test
Written by Barry Warsaw in technology on Fri 15 April 2011. Tags: test drive, ubuntu, virtual machine,
Ubuntu 11.04 (code name: Natty Narwhal) beta 2 was just released and the final release is right around the corner. Canonical internal policy is that we upgrade to the latest in-development release as soon as it goes beta, to help with bug fixing, test, and quality assurance.
Now, I've been running Natty on my primary desktops (my two laptops) since before alpha 1, and I've been very impressed with the stability of the core OS. One of my laptops cannot run Unity though, so I've mostly been a classic desktop user until recently. My other laptop can run Unity, but compiz and the wireless driver were too unstable to be usable, that is until just before beta 1. Still, I diligently updated both machines daily and at least on the classic desktop, Natty was working great. (Now that beta 1 is out, the wireless and compiz issues have been cleared up and it's working great too.)
The real test is my beefy workstation. This is a Dell Studio XPS 435MT 12GB, quad-core i7-920, with an ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card, running dual-headed into two Dell 20" 1600x1200 flat panel displays. During the Maverick cycle I was a little too aggressive in upgrading it, because neither the free nor the proprietary drivers were ready to handle this configuration yet. I ended up with a system that either couldn't display any graphics, or didn't support the dual heads. This did eventually all get resolved before the final release, but it was kind of painful.
So this time, I was a little gun shy and wanted to do more testing before I committed to upgrading this machine. Just before Natty beta 1, I dutifully downloaded the daily liveCD ISO, and booted the machine from CD. On the surface, things seemed promising …