You call this an upgrade?

[mdlbear]

Last night in a fit of boredom I upgraded my Debian Etch system (a major upgrade that included the modular X11R7 from x.org), then brought the machine down to play with my newly-downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and DeMuDi 1.3rc1 install disks. It's been a while since I logged in.

The first annoyance was that neither Ubuntu nor DeMuDi recognized my old-but-far-from-obsolete 3dfx video card. They both came up at 800x600, with no obvious way to change the screen resolution -- certainly Ubuntu's control panel didn't give me any other choices. Feh. But that's fixable, one way (drag over the config files from the Etch partition) or another (upgrade the card, which I've been meaning to do anyway).

Update: On closer examination it seems that DeMuDi, at least, recognized my video card just fine. So I'm guessing that what it didn't recognize is the capabilities of my monitor. That would probably be because my cheap KVM switch is blocking the newfangled monitor information signal path.

The second annoyance was that DeMuDi (Ubuntu as well, I think) still has Audacity 1.2 instead of the newer and sexier, but still beta, 1.3. Fixable again, since I've gotten 1.3 to build from source. I'll probably still wait until 1.3 is out of beta and supported in Debian.

The third, and more serious, annoyance was that somewhere in the sequence of upgrades the C preprocessor called by xrdb started putting a space after macro expansions. This is fine for C, but it's not a good thing when you're using macros to construct X geometries and font specs, as I was. GAAK! As it turns out, I had dealt with this a couple of weeks ago at work. I just didn't remember how, so I spent several hours removing most of the macros (which I won't miss, since they mostly parametrize things I've long since made permanent decisions about, like whether I want Emacs on the left or right side of the screen). But it's annoying.

Finally got to bed a little before midnight, with a once-again-mostly-working X configuration in my Etch partition. Grumbly bear, but at least things are reasonably stable again.