Ubuntu 12.04 oddities, the good and the bad and the ugly

The good

• a lot of packages are now in Ubuntu. Python is fairly complete (though enthought remains a good competitor), and libraries such as pgplot, cfitsio, hdf4, plplot, are supported.
• plugging in an external monitor never worked well on the T61p, but it's a charm on the T530. Clearly an issue with the inferior graphics card support on the T61p.
• suspend works like a charm, again the T61p was more unreliable on the same kernels, clearly Lenovo doesn't keep their BIOS up to date.

the bad

the ugly

1. compiz is taking a lot of memory and cpu sometimes, also hot corners keeps disappearing and appearing seemingly at will. The command

   compiz replace

   doesn't seem to work well, it will e.g. put all my Terminal's back on 1st desktop.
2. unity has a lot of quirkcy problems, perhaps triggered by my fast fingers (sometimes those trigger a screendump). Sometimes i can loose my emacs window, can't seem to maximize it. a trick is to open another one, and using Super-W you can then see both of them. But before none is visible.
3. at one instance, all my icons from the desktop have disappeared.

QUick Links to the usual we need