Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop

= Upgrade procedure =

After the graphical updater downloaded a ton of packages (around 3.5 GB in total) it started upgrading the system in place.

This did not went completely smooth, the installer complained about a missing package (ubuntu-desktop could not be configured due to missing dependencies).

This had to be sorted out semi-manually with sudo apt-get -f install.

The default theme (adwaita) was broken after the upgrade, leading to unpleasant transient issues with the desktop.

Apart from some glitches with the mouse apparently caused by powerd.service and a manual upgrade to Mate 1.14, everything seemed to work more or less.

Installing a XBox360 controller kernel driver
Surprisingly, one new USB-device did not work out of the box and the kernel-driver needed patching.

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/695069/xbox-controller-blinking Option 1 for the solution, which worked for me:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mdeslaur/steamos/ sudo apt-get install steamos-xpad-dkms

This did not resolve the problems completely, probably some kind of initialization issue during boot time. The controller keeps blinking (instead of switching the green LED on top to one of the four positions). Unplugging and replugging the controller solves this, but it is annoying.

powerd.service takes ages until failure on boot
powerd.service takes ~ 3 min until it finally fails to start. During that time, the desktop becomes unresponsive.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/powerd/+bug/1443278

basically:

sudo systemctl disable powerd.service sudo systemctl stop powerd.service sudo apt-get remove powerd

Done. WTF?

ttf-mscorefonts-installer can't download fonts
The ttf-mscorefonts-installer package produced a failure message, stating, that https://netix.dl.sourceforge.net/project/corefonts/the fonts/final/andale32.exe 404  Not Found, which is a problem with the SourceForge page hosting the archive. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/852302/failure-to-download-extra-data-files-ttf-mscorefonts-installer for a solution (basically, downstream and install the upstream 3.6 package).

Summary
Not perfect, but overall, it appears to work.

Some fine tuning is needed to get minor issues resolved.

More to come...