Lots of changes at once and one OpenSCAD bump

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In order to get my new 4k display connected to my Linux box at work I had to replace the graphics card (actually I was replacing none but the motherboard's one). For the 3840x2160 resolution I selected a cheap ATI board that apparently had decent Linux support, the $100 board RX460.

First problem was my computer did show nothing on the new screen, that was fixed connecting the old one and using the BIOS to switch default video to the new card. Then Ubuntu 14.04 would boot but failed to recognize the new card, which makes sense as the driver was not install. However I would get graphics working using the software rendered (frame buffer). When looking for the Linux drivers I realized I would need to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04, something I wanted to do for a while but kept leaving for a rainy day.

One colleague at work mentioned to me he have had quite a good experiencing upgrading a couple of systems from 14.04 to 16.04 so I was set to do it then, now that it was supposed to be easy. My experience was not as good as his, as installation complained about unsupported packages and eventually died off stating the upgrade would leave my system into an unstable state so it was cancelled.

However, after booting the system again I realized it was actually running the new version regardless of what it said before (maybe the going back to 14.04 failed too?). However I could no longer succeed with the graphical login, that would fail on me everytime. But text terminals would work ok, so I downloaded the ATI driver for my board and installed it. Next reboot I was back in business with the graphical login and now I could see the graphical interface moved smoothly and efficiently as hardware acceleration was working. I went to the graphics setup to set the scale of menu and title bars to a slighly larger size so I can read them more easily (after all, going to a larger display was done in part to view more and better the screen).

I had a couple of hickups with some leftovers of the 14.04, but eventually managed to remove the old packages and install the new ones. And it all seemed to work ok now. However I realized the OpenSCAD program cause a segmentation fault everytime I tried to start in in GUI mode. Command line operation was working though. So I assumed there was some problem maybe with my current graphics configuration. Unfortunately I was not able to find any complains of a similar problem on the web and removing an reinstalling the package did not cure it either. So I went ahead and installed a newer, nightly build, instead of the stable version and that is working flawlessly with my new hardware. I guess the cause of the fault is gone with one of the changes from the last version.

What is best is the most of the tools I have installed the last three years are already installed and printers, accounts and digital certificates do not need to be setup again. It was not an easy upgrade but it was painless than a new install and longish migration of data to the new system.

After figuring out how to send the audio through the Display Port cable, I realized the audio feature is not the most remarkable one of this 32" display by Benq, so I am keeping my old speakers that deliver richer sound.

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