Ubuntu Intrepid upgrade problems solved

Oct 15, 2008

I recently upgraded two of my computers to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) which was in alpha at that time and is beta at present. Some small thing always seems to break for me with an upgrade and this time there were two issues, which I have finally managed to sort out this week.

1. Google calendar in Thunderbird

I had my google calendar nicely set up in Thunderbird using the Lightning and Provider for Google calendar extensions. After the upgrade, my google calendar wasn't displaying anymore and moreover all the calendar related menu items were disabled. Finally I found the answer here.
I uninstalled lightning and provider, did a 'sudo aptitude install libstdc++5', then reinstalled the extensions. On restarting thunderbird, the calendar was now there as before.. a relief.

2. Fingerprint reader and thinkfinger

After the upgrade, my fingerprint reader appeared to not be working. Swiping the finger elicited no response at all. Searching in launchpad brought me here showing others were having the same issue. Surprisingly it seemed that the fingerprint identification was working, but needed a carriage return (Enter key) after the swipe to work. Some workarounds are beginning to appear (though nothing final) and what worked for me was a simple change in xorg.conf. Adding the line
'InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"' to the "ServerLayout" section got the reader working again after a restart of xserver.

Hope these help someone with simlar issues.