Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

= Intro =

Recently I said good-bye to the not-so-often-used version of Ubuntu 5.10 and replaced it with the most recent version 7.10 (again only one CD-ROM, which was the main reason to install it).

= Download =

Downloaded the CD-ROM image from one of the ftp servers, painless.

= Basic install =

Install went painless except for one thing -the mouse.

= Tweaking =

The serial mouse
I use an old serial MouseMan from Logitech, which is not even detected by the 7.10 version.

Surfing the net was not a big deal except, that all recipies found there where incomplete.

Here's what you should do to get your Serial MouseMan working correctly:

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the "InputDevice" section like this:

Section     "InputDevice" Identifier "Configured Mouse" Driver    "mouse" Option    "CorePointer" Option    "Device"       "/dev/ttyS0" Option    "Protocol"     "Microsoft" EndSection

Depending on your connector, it could also be "/dev/ttyS1" (the second serial port).

The protocoll should be "Microsoft". On my machine, leaving this on "Auto" did not work. because it led to very long delays (30 sec or so) after X-Server restart until the mouse decided, that it was really there and would move.

Another theme
Let's face it. Brown sucks. I replaced the standard theme with that of Ubuntu Studio -pretty nice:

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list, append this

deb http://archive.ubuntustudio.org/ubuntustudio gutsy main

Afterwards execute the following commands from a shell:

wget http://archive.ubuntustudio.org/ubuntustudio.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look ubuntustudio-theme ubuntustudio-icon-theme ubuntustudio-wallpapers

as described on http://www.belutz.net/2007/05/11/installing-ubuntu-studio-theme/. Works more or less (still some brown left here and there). Yuck.

= Things which don't work =

Graphics acceleration works, but Ubuntu refuses to start the 3D-effects for the desktop. I use a pretty ancient nVidia GeForce2MX. Haven't had the time to look into the reason for this. Apart from that, everything works fine.