Upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 on my HP EliteBook 8530p

Here is a report of my upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 on my HP EliteBook 8530p (model number FU617AW).

The upgrade process went smooth in almost 1 hour of time. There were about 1200 packages to upgrade for about 900MB of download.

Here is a quick report about problems encountered after reboot:

1. ATI Video Card NOT WORKING. The laptop has an ATI HD 3650 (R600 chipset). The fglrx ATI driver is not working with the latest x.org version 1.6 provided by Jaunty. At this time this is not yet resolved, I’ve filed a but on the ATI site. The bad thing is that the fglrx driver makes my machine crash, I get a black screen of death when X fires up. I’m sure that there is a Kernel Panic but I was not able to catch any info (I’ve no console on serial…).The only work around for now is to use the free ATI driver provided by xorg, even if with this type of video card 3D acceleration is not working. So the performance compared to 8.10 are really worse for the moment.
2. Trackerd Corrupted Index. After logging in, I got several pop-up message from tracker about “Tracker Index Corrupted”. This is a know bug (see Bug #346912 for example) and the only workaround is to remove the contents of ~/.cache/tracker and of ~./.local/share/tracker/data and to restart trackerd. It will re-build all the indexes and will work fine.
3. Garbaged Printing with some black squares. There is some problem in ghostscript or foomatiq filtering which leads to have some letters substituted with black squares. This is a known problem (see Bug #361772) and I did not get a solution yet.
4. Reduced Battery life. I’ve the impression that the battery duration is significantly less compared to 8.10. When switching to battery (from fully charged), the estimated duration dropped to about 2 hours from 3 hours with 8.10. I still have to investigate the reason.

So, if you are in doubt about upgrading or not, be warned of these problems. I will try to update this post whenever I’ll get the solutions.

((enjoy))