I updated my Ubuntu Linux boxes from Feisty to Gutsy long before Gutsy was officially released, and noticed several 'buggettes' - I'll not call them bugs as they are only minor.

Some things that worked fine on the previous Feisty release stopped working correctly under Gutsy and even though the seem to have been recognised by Ubuntu have still not been fixed.

In no particular order, the list below will grow has I remember what the buggettes were and how/if I managed to get around them.

• QEMU and BOCHS BIOS
• Critical Battery level handling
• Gnome window themes
• Compiz, Compiz Fusion etc.
• Hybernation, and Swap
• Framebuffer Consoles

QEMU

QEMU under Gutsy uses the BOCHS BIOS, but the BOCHS package is ancient. Some people say that using the BOCH BIOS from the Debian packages will cure this but I've not tried that. Others say to use the CVS copy of the BOCH BIOS, but don't compile it - there is a precompiled copy of a working BIOS in the CVS directory tree, which you can just copy over the BOCHS BIOS that the Ubuntu package has installed.

Critical Battery level handling

Under Feisty, when the battery level dropped to less than a critical setting the system would do a tidy closedown. On Gutsy, the system just stops when the battery is completely exhausted.

The gnome-power-manager can be set to examine the critical level by examining the minumum time remaining (5 mins) or the percentage of life left (3%). The default setting on Gutsy is to use the time-based method which for some reason doesn't work - changing the setting of /apps/gnome-power-manager/general/use_time_for_policy using the gconf-editor to be unset will allow the system to use the percentage based method. I changed the user preference to goto sleep rather than a shutdown as well.

Gnome window themes

Under Feisty, I remember there was a setting to the appearance preferences to us an OpenGL theme style for the Gnome Windows. On changing to Gutsy, I wanted to go back to the standard MeteCity window themes but the setting isn't in preferences any more.

It appears that what was called OpenGL under Feisty is part of the Cairo Libraries with Gutsy, and you can back to Metacity themes by unsetting /apps/gwd/use_metacity_theme with the gconf-editor.

Compiz, Comiz Fusion etc.

Under Feisty there were two competing forces for OpenGL desktops, Beryl and Compiz. With Gutsy it now comes as standard with Compiz, but Beryl hasn't gone completely. A lot of the Beryl funtionality has been ressurected in Compiz Fusion. For starters, Compiz Fusion is NOT Beryl. Secondly, Compiz is a different animal from Compiz Fusion. Confused?, You soon Will be..

A lot of the hype surrounding Gutsy has been showing off the fancy OpenGL effects that the system is capable of with desktops on each face of a cube, Coverflow style window selection, or Vista style window selection and loads of others.

Here comes the niggle: The package used to select all these features of Compiz Fusion isn't loaded by default, so the fancy features don't show up after the Install. What you have to do is add the Compiz Fusion config package manually.

Hybernation, and Swap

This may be a problem with my laptop rather than globally.

Originally my laptop (DELL Latitude D610) came with 512 MB of memory and I set the system up with a 2 GB swap partition but never really used Hybernation as the system would never restart the graphics system but appeared to restart OK otherwise.

A few months ago I replaced the 512MB with 2GB memory, and after Gutsy had been running for a while I decided to give Hybernation another try to see if things had improved.

Now the system appears to hybernate correctly, but when I try an bring it back up from hybernation the system appears to do a normal boot with one exception.

The SWAP partition won't mount, and the only way round it is to remake the SWAP filesystem and update the //etc/fstab enty with a new UUID string for the SWAP device.

I'm guessing that the hybernation process writes its system state to the SWAP partition and reads it back from there on restart - and since my laptop now has 2GB memory and a 2GB SWAP partition that there isn't enough space to write the system image out.

I removed half the memory and tried to hibernate the system which it did appear to do, but on reawakening the system just complained about not being able to mount the swap partition (as above). I have commented out the bit about HIBERNATION in /etc/defaults/acpi-support so that the system doesn't give me the option of Hibernating as it clearly doesn't work.

FrameBuffer Consoles

I have a few applications that I like to run on a framebuffer console like Predict Satellite Tracking. Normal consoles are a bit restrictive with such applications as they normally allow only an 80x24 display, but with a framebuffer they will work with around a 120x40 display so a lot more detail can be shown.

On Feisty this worked quite well, but the FrameBuffer consoles are absent on Gutsy. From what I can see they were disabled as they could cause system hangups - which I never saw in Feisty.

The procedure for enabling the FrameBuffer console is a bit fiddly and I'll add what I've done to get them working on my system soon.