First impressions of Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)

For previous Ubuntu versions, I had used the Alternate CD .iso image installer in order to get disk encryption for my laptop. As Marius Nestor correctly points out, there’s no Alternate CD with 12.10 – this feature is now wrapped in the main installer. I discovered all this after my first install using the “Something else” option shown Marius’ post, which didn’t offer the disk encryption option (or perhaps I missed it).

Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)

There’s no GUI method of turning off “Guest Session” login, but it can be easily done in config.

The launcher is much improved and rearranging icons is finally a user-friendly experience.

I don’t like advertised content in the Dash. I’m betting the community will shout that idea down. But in the meantime, I think I saw a way to turn them off along with Twitter/Facebook/Gmail/etc. integrations.

Overall, my early-2008 vintage ZaReason 2GB BigLap had been ready for a fresh install. Now it’s running 12.10 just fine, thank you very much. It’s a worthy upgrade.

extend Kubuntu desktop to second screen

Update, 2010-06-19:  I use a different approach than the one described in this post since I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04.

I successfully extended my Kubuntu desktop to a second monitor.  I’m running Kubuntu 8.04 (updated on 2009-07-03 for 9.04) on a ZaReason BigLap, with an Intel video card and a Dell external monitor (connected via VGA cable – the BigLap doesn’t have a DVI interface).

look Ma, no video driver

While tinkering today, I managed to bring my ZaReason BigLap to its knees by installing an incompatible video driver.  No matter, James’ post over at elwoodicious guided me to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, which I thought I’d probably have to nurse back to life using his xorg.conf as an example.

But somebody upstream in my Kubuntu stack was thinking ahead:  hey, this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing when it comes to video drivers.  When I rebooted to command line, I found backups of all my interim xorg.confs from earlier this afternoon.  Replaced the corrupted one with a backup just by looking at the timestamp, resumed the boot process, Booyah Achieved.