Posts Tagged ‘upgrade’
Brief notes on Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) -> 9.10 (karmic)
Recording my Ubuntu upgrade experience has become something of a tradition, so here goes.
- Machine 1 (laptop, LG T1 Express Duo). Largely trouble-free. On-board soundcard not seen on reboot. Fixed (temporarily, lost on reboot) using “sudo alsa force-reload”.
- Machine 2 (various generic hardware, cobbled together over many years). Upgrade smooth until final restart, when machine froze. Rebooted to a blank screen. Fixed by swapping out ATI video card for old NVidia FX5200. Discovered that rsyslog is running riot due to a hot CPU and is trying to fill up /var/log.
- Machine 3 (Dell Optiplex GX550). Install froze at “stopping winbind server”. Rebooted with rescue CD, mounted and chroot-ed into Linux partition, tried “dpkg –force-all –configure -a”, but to no avail. Reinstalled in same partition, all is working well.
All in all, not very impressed. Canonical, could do better.
Brief Hardy Heron notes
Nothing exciting – just a couple of notes on the Ubuntu upgrade experience from 7.10 to 8.04.
Read the rest…
Feisty to Gutsy: things that I should know by now
- Never attempt to upgrade an Ubuntu distribution on the day of the new release
- If you do, don’t use your primary desktop machine
- Complex tasks that can trash a machine should not be performed after midnight
I only have myself to blame but still: I didn’t expect the upgrade manager to simply vanish midway through the procedure, leaving an unusable system. One thing that I have learned is not to panic. Provided /home is on a separate partition, you can always do a clean install from CD and restore your packages pretty quickly.
Not sure why I’m experiencing zen-like calm rather than seething rage – must be Friday.


