Tag Archives: upgrade

Hardy Heron, step 2

Posted on by

After getting comfortable with the Heron on my first machine, I decided to update my Laptop. Ignoring any issues I had had first time round, I simply ran the update manager, and pressed the button!

That, it turns out, was a mistake. nvidia-glx again failed to upgrade, and that caused most of xorg to fail to upgrade properly. This time, however, I did not try a reboot before having tried to fix the problem.

The solution in the end was to manually create an empty file that was missing and stopping the old nvidia-glx from un-installing. With that done, I was then able to upgrade that package, and all the remaining un-configured packages were sorted.

Having read somewhere that the new xorg is able to sort out its own configuration, I decided to give that a try and rm’d all my xorg.conf files. That’s right, no backing up. Back ups are for wimps!

X did start just fine, but using the vesa driver, at some horrible low resolution. At this point, I realised that maybe backups of my config files would have been a good idea. 🙂

I finally got the Nvidia driver installed, but it would refuse to use the correct resolution. At this point I remember having the same problem last time I set up the Nvidia driver. The problem is that the Nvidia driver will not use any resolution that it does not find in the EDID. Setting UseEDID to ‘no’ has no effect. The only solution, from what I can remember, is to use a utility in Windows to extract the EDID to a file, and then use the option for the Nvidia driver to look to that file for the EDID.

Luckily, as this was an upgrade, and not a re-install, I still had the EDID file from before, and once again, I had xorg running at the correct resolution.

That meant that the whole operation took a lot longer than I wanted. Next time, I will try and remember to downgrade as much as possible before update. If I had switched to the nv driver, and kept a backup of xorg.conf, I could have updated this system really easily. Well at least I now know for next time.

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) First Steps

Posted on by

I decided to upgrade one of my machines to Hardy. Well the upgrade borked. I think it had something to do with nvidia-glx, so I can’t really blame Ubuntu. I probably could have figured it out, but I decided as this is a LTS version, I would go for a fresh install.

As expected, the install went fine. The final result is a very nice system. Somehow it seems faster and a little smarter. I think I would have to say that I am quite happy with this release so far.

One problem that I did have was with rhythmbox. Before the upgrade I had a problem where it would not suffle play my music. I hoped that the upgrade would fix this, but the problem persisted. I was just about to delete any config file in my home directory that may have something to do with rhythmbox when I decided to have one last Google for a fix. It turns out that the shuffle play will only work with playlists. Anything in the play queue will be played it is in the queue. Makes sense I suppose, but when you are not aware of it, it may catch you out. Once I deleted the contents of the play queue, it started to function as expected.

I will hold back from installing it on my laptop until the final release at least. I also want to install the server version on my home server. That has been running Debian for years, so I need to plan my way carefully with that one to avoid too much downtime.

WordPress upgrade

Posted on by

I have just upgraded this blog to use the new WordPress 2.3 release. It was so easy, I thought that it had not worked! It is not exactly clear what has changed, but I do now have Tags and a funky tag cloud. Having only one plug-in installed, and a theme that is only a small modification of a standard theme probably helped.

Resist the urge to upgrade

Posted on by

I am currently running Ubuntu 7.04 on two computers at home. In the past, I have always found it hard to resist the urge to install the development version of the next release of the distribution I am running. This started when I was using Debian. With its slow release cycle, Debian stable did start to feel a bit tired as a desktop system.

I would find that the latest version of some software with the features that I was interested in was not available. Rather than muck about with back-ports etc., I just went and installed testing, and then unstable. These are only my own machines, and the need for stability was not critical. The only time this did bother me was when I wanted to print. I found that my printer needed to be re-configured at regular intervals. A couple of times this did bite me as I wanted to print something quick, and due to changes in CUPS or whatever, my printer was off-line.

I then moved to Ubuntu. With its shorter release cycle, I decided that I would have the best of both worlds. I could have the more recent versions of software, and not have unpredictable breakage. Two upgrades a year should be ample. Well I could not wait for the final release of version 7.04 so I installed that a few months early, to try out compiz IIRC.

Now I am trying hard to resist the urge to upgrade to 7.10 before it is released. I fully expect that it is already stable enough for my use, but it would be good to wait until it has been released to try it. Not long to go now!