There are many great features in 10.4: Installation seems flawless, many of the devices that were laborious to install in 8.10 are PNP in 10.4 (gc-100 and PLM for example) and video streaming of movies and recorded TV seems to work better than ever.
However, there are also a number of surprising things I have been finding out while trying to get 8.10 devices to work on 10.4:
Don't try and upgrade the nvidia driver--it will put you into API mismatch hell
Ctrl alt backspace will not get you out of the x terminal in 10.4--you have to manually go in to the keyboard setup and tell it those keystrokes
The PNP que only gives you so many chances to use a device--use them up and you have to go into mysql and delete all instances of the device in the database so that it can start over.
Drivers that were buggy/non functional in 8.10 may seem functional in 10.4 but may still be buggy--do your research.
A case in point brought me to another surprising discovery: When you go to update a diskless MD (as when you change the buggy Realtek 8169 driver that comes with 10.4 to the updated 8168 driver that works well with 10.4) you run into a conflict between different kernels:
root@dcerouter:/boot# cd /usr/pluto/diskless/
root@dcerouter:/usr/pluto/diskless# chroot 80
root@dcerouter:/# depmod
WARNING: Couldn't open directory /lib/modules/2.6.32-45-generic: No such file or directory
FATAL: Could not open /lib/modules/2.6.32-45-generic/modules.dep.temp for writing: No such file or directory
root@dcerouter:/boot# uname -a
Linux dcerouter 2.6.32-45-generic #104-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 19 21:21:41 UTC 2013 i686 GNU/Linux
root@dcerouter:/# cd /lib/modules/
root@dcerouter:/lib/modules# ls
2.6.32-46-generic
What is going on? one says 45 and the other is 46.
My workaround (which seems to work so far):
root@dcerouter:/usr/pluto/diskless# chroot 80
root@dcerouter:/# depmod 2.6.32-46-generic
root@dcerouter:/# mkinitramfs -o initrd.img-`uname -r` 2.6.32-46-generic
here is the background on the issue:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168I've done update and upgrade inside both the core and the MD
I admit profound ignorance when it comes to depmod and the different kernels in play. My question: Is this a bug that needs to be addressed?
Many thanks for any input.