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.

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?

Summary

Not perfect, but overall, it appears to work.

Some fine tuning is needed to get minor issues resolved.

More to come...