Upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 today. My motivation for upgrade was twofold:

• Take advantage of the improved support for my wireless card in the 3.2 kernel. My MacBook Pro BCM4331 wireless adapter needed some love in earlier kernels. See Linux support for Broadcom 4331 wireless chip (Macbook Pro 8,1) for a great how-to.
• Get on a Long Term Support release.

In short, the experience was good, with two small snags.

As expected, the upgrade left my patched wireless driver in the dust. This was relatively simple to fix. I just downloaded the Broadcom driver from the above-referenced how-to, ran the b43-fwcutter command (with the vanilla apt-get version–no need to patch or hand-build anything), and voila: wifi.

Xmonad was a little trickier. When I tried to run the “Gnome with Xmonad” session from the login screen, it failed. syslog showed a segfault, in Xorg I believe. Boo.

I removed and re-installed the xmonad and gnome-panel packages. One encouraging bit: the Xsession entries automatically showed up, which I believe I had to do by hand before. Nice. The Xsession stayed open, but the window manager seemed missing.

I tried moving my ~/.xmonad/ directory. That got Xmonad to stay alive, though it seemed confused about the gnome desktop, and keyboard shortcuts weren’t working.

So, I moved my ~/.xmonad/ directory back. The window manager seemed missing again. ps showed the Xmonad process was defunct, and something more insightful: it was running ~/.xmonad/xmonad-x86_64-linux. I whacked this file, logged back in, and all is well. Must’ve been a stale version compiled against old libraries.

Update

I just found this issue in an Xmonad bug report. Hopefully this will be automated in the post-install script soon.

Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin: so far, so good. I’m glad to have my wireless adapter better integrated into the kernel, and glad to be on an LTS release.