Sound Issue in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta

This morning when logging in to my newly-upgraded-to-Ubuntu-10.10 laptop, sound was not working. It appears that the solution was very simple: my user was not authorised to use audio devices. I don't know why it was disabled as it had always worked fine before but it's very easy to solve so if you have the same problem check that first. To resolve it, go to System → Administration → Users and Groups, select your user, click on the Advanced Settings button, enter your password, click the User Privileges tab and make sure the Use audio devices box is checked. While you're at it, do the same for the other users on your system.

User Settings dialogue

If that doesn't work, there is a handy wiki page on debugging sound problems.

Ubuntu 10.10 Beta First Impressions

Ubuntu released the first Maverick beta a couple of days ago. As I had some time on my hands today (including the time to re-install Lucid if it all went pear shaped), I decided the upgrade my ThinkPad T42 so, as instructed, I typed this in a terminal:

update-manager -d

And here's how it went.

The Good

• The upgrade took a few hours, was extremely smooth and just worked.
• Everything that I've tried so far just works out of the box, no regressions (apart from a small glitch, see below).
• I thought Ubuntu 10.04 was fast but 10.10 is even faster! Firefox and Evolution in particular feel snappier.
• The new keyboard layout indicator is bigger and clearer.
• Shotwell replaces F-Spot.

The Bad

• Some old bugs like ThinkPad sound notifications still don't seem to have been fixed but from the bug report it's not trivial so hopefully it will get sorted at some point.
• A bug for which I provided a patch a couple of months ago is back as librsvg has been updated to the latest version which doesn't contain the fix.

The Ugly

• The default background really doesn't look good so the first thing I did was change to a different background image.

All in all, an excellent upgrade!