Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Debian Lenny to Squeeze on Thinkpad T42

The good:
  • Faster bootup.
  • Very fast switching between X and a VT.
  • Firefox 3.5 is much faster than 3.0.
  • Most Thinkpad extra keys now work great out of the box.
  • Cool desktop backgrounds.
The bad:
  • X11 looked funny. Turns out no themes were installed. Had to install gnome-themes.
  • Got a bunch of warnings from udev on bootup, coming from z60_xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules, so I purged xserver-xorg-input-wacom.
  • The ACPI hotkey events changed names, so some hooks I had set up in /etc/acpi/events stopped working until I updated the names.
  • EmulateWheel setting in xorg.conf no longer works. xinput works. I installed gpointing-device-settings, which is a very convenient solution.
  • Alt_R keycode is now 108 instead of 113.
The ugly:
  • X wouldn't start. Turns out it was because gdm wasn't installed. Why did gdm get removed during upgrade? Maybe it wanted to replace it with gdm3? But it didn't install gdm3.