Dragon's Breath

Yesterday i decided to upgrade by Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake (which is still in the testing stage). I just couldn't help myself. I absolutely HAD to see what it's all about. Patience was never one of my strong points anyway. The last time i tried to upgrade my system (from Hoary to Badger) it caused a massive problems i.e. not booting properly, not being able to mount my remote drives, etc. But did those problems and spending days to reconfigure back my machine back to the way i like stop me from trying. HELL NO!!. Especially after what I read about Dapper and its new features. These are the steps i used to upgrade it

• edited my /etc/apt/sources.list
• changed all references of "breezy" to "dapper"
• "apt-get update"
• "apt-get dist-upgrade -y"

and voila, after 3 hours plus all the new packages were installed and updated and after a reboot, which i find to be faster than Breezy (at least thats how it seems to me), I was presented with my NEW GDM login screen.

The first thing I did was to login to GNOME just to see what changes have been made. Granted that I already had a previous configuration setting for GNOME anyway so i might be missing out on some default settings/layout. Graphically its the same as the previous version but what caught my eye immediately was that the GNOME panel is now slightly smaller (I've been trying to figure out how to change the size but never managed it. Probably have to edit it using gconf but I was too lazy after switching to XFCE4) and they have applets that warn you about your impending hard disk capacity exhaustion. Also it now comes with gnome-screensaver which offers a whole slew of REALLY cool looking screensavers and a OS-X like password prompt.

After that I decided to switch back to fluxbox which somehow seems much faster. However all my fonts are like super humongous at the moment but i'll let it stick for now. It's kinda nice not to have to squint your eyes trying to read all the config file. I've had it running for more than 18 hours now and it seems just fine and dandy. i just hope it stays that way though.

Some of the other changes include Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 that comes default with Dapper. Previously I had to download Firefox manually and do some reconfiguring (which aint hard anyway) but now that i have it default it makes me even happier. Also i get to retain my extensions that I have already been using ;).

Will post more as I come across newer features/changes ;) Time for lunch:D