A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktops from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Using the upgrade instructions from the Ubuntu website, I used the network upgrade method for Ubuntu servers. I did not want to use the update-manager application to manage the upgrade because of a bad upgrade experience from Dapper Drake. To resolve my previous problem, I performed a complete reinstall of my system.

Most blogs and reviews of Gutsy highlights enhanced 3D Desktop support using compiz. For my non-Linux friends, below are some screenshots of my desktop:

The figure above shows the Shift Switcher plugin. It cycles through all of the window applications through a nice panel shuffler interface. Below is the “Mac-like” Scale Window plugin. It gives an overview of all the windows present on my Desktop.

Another key upgrade of Gutsy was the shift from using the teTeX disribution to TeXlive. These are the package distribution for the LaTeX/ TeX typesetting suite. As an academic, this is one of the most important applications in my workstation’s setup. Here is an excerpt from the tetex-bin transition package:

teTeX is no longer developed upstream, and has been replaced by the TeX Live collection. This is a transitional package to bring former teTeX users a decent selection of TeX Live packages. It can be safely removed (unless some external packages still depend on tetex-bin).

Note, however, that the functionality of the TeX Live subset that is chosen is not exactly the same as that of tetex-bin, due to the different splitting schemes.

When I upgraded my home desktop, the LaTeX upgrade took most of the upgrade time because it keeps caching the fonts for every package. Thus, I first remove the tetex-* packages from my office workstation before performing another upgrade. When the upgrade to Gutsy was finished, I installed the related texlive-* packages.