[Ubuntu-US-CA] [Smaug] A quirky upgrade bug

[Grant Bowman]

Hi Peter,

I am sorry to hear you had so many troubles helping your friend. I hope that
by copying this reply to the Ubuntu mail list for California some others can
provide some suggestions to you directly. I will contact you later as well.

Grant Bowman
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam

On Aug 12, 2009 2:33 PM, "Peter Belew" <peterbe at sonic.net> wrote:

People at the meeting last Monday heard me on the phone talking about
problems a friend in San Francisco was having installing Linux on his
computer, to replace a virus-ridden Windows XP. A lot of the problem had to
do with the installer or installed Linux not recognizing his display
hardware.

I ended up actually going up there on Tuesday. What we ended up doing was to
install Ubuntu 7.10 (which allows one to specify in the command line - using
a selection you get by pressing F4 when the installer/livecd boots). Once
that was installed (and recognized his USB wifi interface) he did an upgrade
install into Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (good till 2011!). At the very end of the
upgrade, the process hung, while doing some initrd processing, due to a
problem with network_assistant.

After waiting a long while for this to complete, and finally doing a hard
reboot, the new system wouldn't boot into the new kernel, only into the
previous kernel. He submitted a bug report to launchpad:

 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/325180

Has anyone seen anything like this?

More importantly, how should he complete the installation of the new kernel,
now that the system is working otherwise?

One thing I note is that the upgrade does a lot of commenting out and
editing in sources.list, leaving the file looking quite messy. It seems to
me that the upgrade program should really provide a fairly clean version of
that file, as if it were installed from scratch from an 8.04 CD.


- Peter Belew

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