Ubuntu Hardy and Firefox 3

Yesterday I decided to upgrade from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron (beta 1). I usually upgrade early, but my main motivation for this was to be able to implement the new multimedia keys interface working in Exaile. Apparently, the Gnome crew decided to change this particular part of the DBus interface making it backwards incompatable. A description of the Exaile bug can be found here.

The upgrade was fairly painless, but here are a few of the gotchas I did experience.

Hardy Issues:

The only problem I had was sound not working once I finally booted into my upgraded system. I found that, by default, the -386 kernel was set as default instead of the -generic kernel. The -386 kernel does not come with snd-* modules for some reason. I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and changed default 0 to default 2, which made it so the -generic kernel would load by default. This fixed my sound issues.

Firefox 3 Issues:

Other than missing extensions that are not yet compatable with Firefox 3, I’ve really only had one really annoying problem. This problem existed in Gutsy when trying to upgrade to FF3, and remained once the upgrade to Hardy was complete (Hardy comes with FF3 by default). The problem is as follows: If you have Firefox on workspace one, and you click on a link in a terminal (or any other application) on a different workspace, the entire firefox window moves to that workspace (even if you have FF set to open links in a new tab).

Googling for answers to this problem revealed nothing, and people in irc.mozilla.org/#firefox couldn’t really understand what I meant. Asking in irc.freenode.net/#ubuntu-us-ut, Christer Edwards informed me that he had the same problem and that in a fresh install of Hardy (as opposed to an upgrade) the problem did not exist. After fiddling around for a bit, I found that a simple rm -rf ~/.mozilla fixed the problem.

I will keep posting as other issues may or may not arise with the upgrade.