Upgrade Nightmare
Monday, 23. April 2007, 12:00:00
The short version:
Saturday morning decided to upgrade to the latest distro of ubuntu. That was a trial of patience, stubbornness and sheer will. Not to mention geekery. Long technical story short, it broke BAD, and I fixed it solo. According to my Linux mentor, I have graduated from n00b status. It was really frustrating and kinda baffling, but the end result of having fixed it made me sorta glowy, honestly. Yeah, I'm that damned geeky.
The long version:
I'm going to start off by saying... I'm sort of still a n00b. Not to computers mind you, just linux. I was using Dapper a month ago. Then came Edgy. I got everything working. Beryl, World of Warcraft via Wine. Sound kicked my butt... (it was onboard) until I caved and just threw in an old Sound Blaster.
I decided to try Feisty. So, I installed all updates for Edgy... except the Wine update, because if Wine is working, it's not getting touched. Well, one of the updates managed to completely fubar Opera. Uninstall/reinstall fixed it.
Upgraded via the Update Manager. It was about halfway through when it decided that there was some issue with the nvidia drivers, and it aborted itself. I then got the lovely "your system may no longer be useable" message. Crossed my fingers and restarted. GRUB had changed the entry for Ubuntu to the new kernel number. Odd... Ubuntu starts up fine, with the Edgy login screen. Everything seems normal. Except...there's 435 new updates. So apparently, it thinks that it's Feisty. Oookay. Decide to just go for it and let the updates install. Update progress freezes halfway through. Decide to restart the x-server instead of the PC, just in case it's a GUI glitch. Login screen comes up, and now it's the Feisty login. Oookay. Everything still works, and apparently now I'm upgraded...right?
Maybe not. I restart the PC, and Ubuntu (Feisty login) comes up again, but now I have no internet connection. Throw in a LiveCD, and hit the IRC channel. Try about 5 different things. Configuring manually, editing the etc/network/configuration file to match the LiveCD's configuration since it doesn't have an issue getting connected.
Give up after two hours or so. Decide to just blow away everything and reinstall Edgy. But, before that as a last resort I decide to check Synaptic Package Manager and make sure I'm not missing anything relating to networking. Well, I try to open Synaptic and it gives me this error (which I no longer remember) that says something along the lines of "You messed something up, and we can't pull up this information. Go manually reconfigure by typing *something* into terminal." So, I do. Lo and Behold, it seems to run through installing all the upgrade packages, all over again. Doesn't fail. Restart...still no net connection, though I do at least have the icons for it now. Retry the previous steps. Failure. Randomly decide to enable roaming.
It works!
I am happy to report that everything still works. Beryl, WoW, Wine. No data loss. Apologies for the lack of technicalness of this post.
Saturday morning decided to upgrade to the latest distro of ubuntu. That was a trial of patience, stubbornness and sheer will. Not to mention geekery. Long technical story short, it broke BAD, and I fixed it solo. According to my Linux mentor, I have graduated from n00b status. It was really frustrating and kinda baffling, but the end result of having fixed it made me sorta glowy, honestly. Yeah, I'm that damned geeky.
The long version:
I'm going to start off by saying... I'm sort of still a n00b. Not to computers mind you, just linux. I was using Dapper a month ago. Then came Edgy. I got everything working. Beryl, World of Warcraft via Wine. Sound kicked my butt... (it was onboard) until I caved and just threw in an old Sound Blaster.
I decided to try Feisty. So, I installed all updates for Edgy... except the Wine update, because if Wine is working, it's not getting touched. Well, one of the updates managed to completely fubar Opera. Uninstall/reinstall fixed it.
Upgraded via the Update Manager. It was about halfway through when it decided that there was some issue with the nvidia drivers, and it aborted itself. I then got the lovely "your system may no longer be useable" message. Crossed my fingers and restarted. GRUB had changed the entry for Ubuntu to the new kernel number. Odd... Ubuntu starts up fine, with the Edgy login screen. Everything seems normal. Except...there's 435 new updates. So apparently, it thinks that it's Feisty. Oookay. Decide to just go for it and let the updates install. Update progress freezes halfway through. Decide to restart the x-server instead of the PC, just in case it's a GUI glitch. Login screen comes up, and now it's the Feisty login. Oookay. Everything still works, and apparently now I'm upgraded...right?
Maybe not. I restart the PC, and Ubuntu (Feisty login) comes up again, but now I have no internet connection. Throw in a LiveCD, and hit the IRC channel. Try about 5 different things. Configuring manually, editing the etc/network/configuration file to match the LiveCD's configuration since it doesn't have an issue getting connected.
Give up after two hours or so. Decide to just blow away everything and reinstall Edgy. But, before that as a last resort I decide to check Synaptic Package Manager and make sure I'm not missing anything relating to networking. Well, I try to open Synaptic and it gives me this error (which I no longer remember) that says something along the lines of "You messed something up, and we can't pull up this information. Go manually reconfigure by typing *something* into terminal." So, I do. Lo and Behold, it seems to run through installing all the upgrade packages, all over again. Doesn't fail. Restart...still no net connection, though I do at least have the icons for it now. Retry the previous steps. Failure. Randomly decide to enable roaming.
It works!
I am happy to report that everything still works. Beryl, WoW, Wine. No data loss. Apologies for the lack of technicalness of this post.
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