After seeing reviews like these for the new version of Ubuntu, I was a bit apprehensive about upgrading. But as usual and despite my attempts to wait, I did so anyway, several days ago. I figured they couldn’t have screwed up the GNOME interface too much, and no matter how bad the new Unity interface was, I could always switch back to that.

Well, I was almost right.

Unity requires 3D graphics support. This MacBook Pro has plenty of that, but VMware Fusion 3 doesn’t support it for Linux guests. When I tried to log in, I got a polite message saying that it couldn’t show the Unity interface, and was reverting to GNOME. Oh well. I’m assuming VMware is working on that problem; until they fix it, I’m stuck with a more stable GNOME system. It could be worse.

Also as usual, this upgrade broke some things, though not too badly:

• GnuCash, the money-manager that I use, would only show a blank window for a couple of my accounts unless I told it to open “New Window with Page”… irritating, but not a show-stopper.
• CodeLite, the programming IDE I’m using, had some very weird scrolling behavior related to the new scroll-bars being a lot smaller than it was expecting. A search immediately turned up a bug-report. It apparently happens with all programs written using the wxWidgets library; presumably the wxWidgets people are already working on a fix. In the mean time, there’s a work-around built into the system to tell it to use the old scroll-bars instead, which works perfectly.
• A couple modules in the VMware Tools package wouldn’t compile, apparently due to API changes. I tried the open-vm-tools package, but it does not replace VMware Tools, no matter what it claims — it doesn’t seem to provide cross-machine copy/paste support or automatic guest screen resizing when switching the host’s resolution (as I must when I switch to the internal monitor to go portable). Again, irritating.

Even better, when I got up this morning there were updates waiting for me, which automatically corrected the problems with both GnuCash and CodeLite. 🙂

There’s also a new version of the VMware Tools system that fixes the problems I had, but the only way I found to get it was to extract it manually. 🙁 A royal pain in the arse, but I did so. On the plus side, it looks like it works perfectly, so far.

I don’t recommend this sort of thing for the general user, or even in many cases the power user. I don’t even recommend it for myself. But if you’re dying to upgrade to Natty, it shouldn’t be too rough.