Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 Upgrade - Review Thus Far + Tangent on muse-score Music Scoring software

I've just upgraded from 8.10 to 9.04 and I want to note my thoughts and the experience thus far. For the most part, the upgrade went relatively smoothly. I ran 8.10 on a Thinkpad T60 with an ATI graphics card that used the fglrx driver. Those of you who are familiar with this setup will know it's never been the most ideal combination of hardware/driver/OS but it mostly worked. 8.10 did seem to smooth out some of the issues with that graphics combo since the 7.04 (was it 7.04 or 7.10.... whatever - back then, I couldn't even use the standard graphical installation from the install CD. I had to use the alternative CD and perform a text-based install due to lack of built-in driver support). So anyway, 9.04 so far seems to have either continued using the driver I already had, which came from 8.10, or upgraded to one the appears to work equally well so far.

One thing I'm MUCH happier about is the dual monitor configuration tool in 9.04. It's almost where it should be to be on par with Windows. The last bit of that functionality that I find lacking is the fact that under certain circumstances whose rules I haven't fully determined just yet, if I enable a second monitor during a gnome session and specify its resolution, I'm told I must logout and back in before it'll take effect. That's slightly BS! I don't want to have to do that! However, it's way better than I remember it having been back in 8.10 (I think was the last time I tried dual monitor). The gui util is simple and straightforward enough. It basically seems I must logout/in if I'm switching resolution I guess. The reason I gave up on dual monitor before now was because whatever underlying implentation of it I was using at the time, X.org + xinerama or twinview or whatever, was fairly lame. It concatenated both monitors into one gimungous virtual display with 1 desktop between both - as opposed to treating 2 monitors as 2 desktops which can share windows seemlessly between each other as is done on windows and I presume OSX as well. And as I recall, both monitors had to be running at the same resolution... totally lame. So to recap on the dual monitor situation, 9.04 now works as Windows does, which is mostly correctly, with the exception that I have to logout/in between certain resolution changes and I suspect (having tested out yet) upon initially enabling a second monitor while I'm already in a gnome session. I can probably live with that for now. BTW, I'm not necessarily criticizing ubuntu, or whoever wrote that monitor config tool - it's great! I suspect the real cause of me having to logout/in between certain changes falls fundamentally on X.org. If it's you guys, I commend you for whatever changes you likely made to make things work this much better and look forward to seeing it all work 100% as well as Windows if not better.

Biggest problem after upgrading so far has been my terminal stopped working. That's total BS too! The actual program is gnome-terminal but I'm sure all gui terminals weren't working. I resolved the problem by editing my fstab and adding the following line:
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
You should be able to issue a: sudo mount -a from a command prompt to cause this change to take effect without restarting the system. Some newbies may be wondering "how can I issue sudo mount -a if I can't get to a terminal?" Well, you can always get to a real terminal with [ctrl][alt][f1-f6]. To get back to X windows from there, do [ctrl][alt][f7] and you'll be right back where you were.
I don't know if that's going to be the official fix for that problem, but it works at least.

So, so far, I'm happy enought with the upgrade. Oh yeah, one other nice little surprise... I lately been working a bit with muse-score to transcribe a song I composed and arranged for my son and 2 nieces to play on Piano, Violin & Cello. After upgrading to 9.04, I got an updated muse-score too and it's considerably better than what was there before - interestingly, I think older version got installed inadvertently when I installed ubuntustudio ontop of standard 8.10 ubuntu. So, upgrading to standard ubuntu 9.10 updated muse-score too. Quite nice. I'd been looking for a function to separate parts so I could print them out separately for the kiddies and now that function exists... unfortunately, it keeps crashing when I generate all three parts and try to tab onto one of them but it did work when I only generated one part, the Piano part, and it let me print it too. I'm quite new to muse-score but I'm fairly impressed with it so far - given that it's FREE! I actually own Sibelius which, at the time of purchase a few years ago, was around $500USD. Although I could always resort back to that, and I've even installed it in Linux under wine/Crossover Office, I'd love to get things done totally FOSS if possible and it looks like it will be/is possible so far.