Unity-2D/Ubuntu Classic (was: Unity: Nothing can go wrong!)

[Liam Proven]

On 17 April 2011 19:56, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 April 2011 19:48, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Mind you, saying that, this install is getting a bit ropy and flakey
>> now. It started off as 9.10 and has been repeatedly upgraded since.
>> I'm very happy for all those people for whom upgrades are
>> trouble-free, but I add lots of stuff, remove things that I don't like
>> or don't use (e.g. Empathy, Evolution) and have loads of extra repos
>> and things. This causes Ubuntu to rot fairly badly inside about 4
>> releases, I find.
>
> You last four? I can't think of any installs of mine that I put
> through more than two. These days I reinstall fresh.

:¬) They don't /all/ last so long. As a wild generalisation, 1 is
usually fine, 2 has niggles, 3 throws errors, 4 breaks it. My last
upgrade, from 10.04 to 10.10, fell over badly on Mozplugger (an
inoffensive little browser plugin) and warned me the upgrade failed,
the system was in an unstable state and might not be usable.

And I'd carefully gone through and removed my direct installs of
Thunderbird and Seamonkey and so on, too. I did have to do some
serious furtling around with /usr/lib/firefox*/plugins,
mozilla*/plugins, xulrunner*/plugins and seamonkey/plugins in Lucid,
mind you, now I come to think of it. That probably did it.

But it booted up OK. I removed Mozplugger, did a 'dpkg --reconfigure
-a' and 'apt-get install -f' and a few things like that, and in the
end, it lived and it's been OK.

Next one will kill it, though, I reckon. I mean, it is going to be a biggie.

But it's time to nuke from orbit and start over, anyway. WINE should
survive; once I reload VirtualBox and a few other things, it should be
OK.

> The chained upgrades trick works in Debian because they work quite
> hard to keep it working. It just doesn't work reliably in Ubuntu, in
> my experience (running every version since 5.04).

Sadly, I am not yet Man Enough for Debian.

I tried putting 5 on the older Thinkpad (no Ethernet, wireless LAN or
Bluetooth). It was mostly OK, but when I tried to upgrade to sid, it
exploded messily.

I have Crunchbang on it now. 9.04 is Ubuntu-based and works, with a
small amount of tweaking. But 10 is Debian 6. In the new Debian, all
the proprietary drivers are gone, so my Ethernet card doesn't work,
nor my wifi card, nor my USB wifi dongle, nor my spare Ethernet card.
So even if I install it, I won't have any Internet access at all, so I
won't be able to install any new drivers. I've not even tried 'cos I
don't know where to begin finding the missing stuff.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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