Ubuntu Precise upgrade (Thinkpad/Xmonad)

by Edward Z. Yang

It is once again time for Ubuntu upgrades. I upgraded from Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot to Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04), which is an LTS release. Very few things broke (hooray!)

  • The Monospace font changed to something new, with very wide glyph size. The old font was DejaVuSansMono, which I switched back to.
  • Xournal stopped compiling; somehow the linker behavior changed and you need to specify the linker flags manually.
  • gnome-keyring isn't properly starting up for us non-Unity folks. The underlying problem appears to be packaging errors by Gnome, but adding eval `gnome-keyring-daemon -s` to my .xsession cleared things up.
  • The battery icon went away! I assume some daemon is failing to get run, but since I have a very nice xmobar display I'm not mourning its loss.
  • Default GHC is GHC 7.4.1! Time to rebuild; no Haskell Platform yet. (Note that GHC 7.4.1 doesn't support the gold linker; this is the chunk-size error.)

I also upgraded my desktop from the previous LTS Lucid Lynx.

  • I had a lot of invalid signature errors, which prevented the release upgrade script from running. I fixed it by uninstalling almost all of my PPAs.
  • Offlineimap needed to be updated because some Python libraries it depended on had backwards incompatible changes (namely, the imap library.)
  • VirtualBox messed up its revision numbers, which contained an underscore which is forbidden. Manually editing it out of the file seems to fix it.