Ubuntu 11.04 Upgrade - Natty Narwhal

Upgraded from 10.04 on both my laptop and desktop.

First thing to note was that the laptop upgrade went very smoothly.
Desktop upgrade broke the hard drive (was not being detected). So I had to do an install from a Live CD and that resolved the issue - whatever it was.

Secondly, the new look and feel of this Ubuntu release marks a big change from previous releases (I have been using Ubuntu since release 8.04). I am not sure I like it but its not enough to prevent me from sticking with what has proved to be a very good OS.

Linux kernel and Linksys USB wireless adapter

I had problems with my Linksys WUSB54GS wireless adapter when I tried to use it with Ubuntu (v9.10 Karmic Koala and v10.04 Lucid Lynx) and Fedora (Fedora Core 2 and Fedora 12).

Sometimes it would work and find my network. Other times it would not. This seemed to be related to issues with its driver (rndis).

I purchased a new TP-Link wireless adapter from e-bay. This worked straight out of the box with Ubuntu 10.04. This uses the rt73 driver (I think).

Anyway, the up-shot is I am finally certain that I have a wireless adapter I can reply on and I can recommend it - for Ubuntu 10.04 at least. I am going to re-install Fedora 12 and see what happens there.

Ubuntu/YouTube/Firefox - "an error occurred, please try again later"

I upgraded my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu (10.04). I noticed straight away that embedded Youtube videos where not working in Firefox. After much messing around I found the following worked.

1) Remove swfdec - a free open source replacement for Adobe Flash Player
2) Remove gnash - the GNU SWF movie player

This was on the back of advice from this post.

This resolved the issue - But i am left wondering what the impacts of removing the above packages may be?

Windows Free

I am now Microsoft Windows free for the first time since University.
CentOS at work, Ubuntu on my laptop, Fedora at home and of course webOS on my Palm Pre.

Feels good :-)