upgrade from 9.04 - 9.10: the most broken Ubuntu / Debian upgrade I have ever experienced

[Davyd McColl]

Sorry if I'm flogging on a dead horse here... Most things are Good (tm), but
I'm having a few oddities for which I would appreciate a nudge in the
correct direction, if I am to resolve them. I don't mind logging bugs and /
or doing some system hackery -- I just don't really know where to start, so
any assistance would be appreciated.

Since the upgrade, I've had:
1) Removable media inconsistently not show up in the Places menu when
inserted (flash drives, external hard-drives, dvd-roms). The problem has
"gone away" on two occasions, but I've been unable to find a proper pattern.
On one occasion, I enabled browsing of inserted media (nautilus
preferences), and the problem subsided (even when I disabled the option
again). However, the problem returned the next day (no reboots in between).
In another instance, after adding a line to /etc/fstab for my dvdrom, both
new optical media and inserted flash drives became visible again. Note that
I have a large external drive which played the disappearing act a day or so
ago, but during this last session, it remained visible the whole time,
though I've seen a couple of these in dmesg:
[125229.160031] usb 1-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and
address 25
Any ideas? Perhaps it could be linked to:
2) I have two fixed drives in my system for That Other OS. I used to just be
able to mount them by clicking their respective icons in the Places menu and
they would be mounted via ntfs-3g (FUSE). Now, one of them (the main drive
of the OS) mounts when I click its icon; the other requires me to authorise
myself with a natty dialog and the reason being related to:
org.freedesktop.devicekit.disks.filesystem-mount-system-internal
The old Authorizations dialog (under the System menu) has (rather had, read
further to see that I've removed the old policykit package) substantially
fewer options in it than I remember, and I see the new package policykit-1
in play. I also notice, from my clean 9.10 vbox vm, that the old policykit
is not installed by default any more. I've uninstalled it from my main
machine here, but it also took a few apps (k3b and some other K apps) with
it -- which I'm not all that pleased about. I don't use k3b often, but it's
nice to know that I have it if I want all the advanced features it offers.

I welcome any suggestions as to (a) what the heart of the problem(s) is/are,
and (b) ideas on how to solve it/them. Also, I'd like to know if policykit
and policykit-1 can interfere with each other? Was removing the older
package necessary?

Thanks.

-- 
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There is no shame in not knowing; the shame is in not finding out.
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