removable drives no longer automount after upgrade to dapper

Matthew Kuiken matt.kuiken at verizon.net
Mon Jun 12 01:03:56 UTC 2006


solemneyed wrote:
> My thanks to those who *respectfully* suggested that the error was 
> mine, and
> my middle finger for those who did so rudely.  :-P
>
> I followed the upgrade instructions on the ubuntu site, and the results
> sucked.  For those of you with better luck, I congratulate you.  
> However, I
> think the problem here is that *luck* seems to be the most significant
> factor at work.
>
> I know I should do a clean install, but I still tend to resist the 
> idea of
> reinstalling every app I regularly use, each time the distro is upgraded.
>
> s
>
> On 6/9/06, Michael Satterwhite <michael at weblore.com> wrote:
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> Rick Chagouri-Brindle wrote:
>> > I would respectfully suggest that perhaps some part of the upgrade was
>> > not performed correctly as I have been using Dapper as my main
>> > production machine - upgraded from Breezy - without any issues.
>>
>> While I'm happy that your upgrade worked fine, that's not the case with
>> everyone. I'm not the person that wrote the message you're replying to,
>> but after upgrading to Dapper today
>>
>>    (1) Printing is down
>>    (2) Sound is down
>>    (3) the USB devices no longer hotplug (which, of course causes #1)
>>
>> As to the assumption of incorrect upgrade, here's the instructions from
>> the wiki
>>
>>    (1) Change all references of Breezy to Dapper
>>    (2) Do a sudo apt-get update
>>    (3) Do a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
>>
>> That doesn't leave much room for error.
>>
>> I've posted the problems I've had since then to the list, but it doesn't
>> appear (at this point) that anyone knows how to address them. If I don't
>> get any answers soon, I'll get my Breezy CD and do an initial install /
>> fallback and write Dapper off as a lost cause. I always like to check a
>> system early so I can advise my clients. In this case, when asked, I'm
>> going to tell them to avoid Dapper like the plague.
>>

While it is unfortunate that the two of you have had so little luck with 
the upgrade, I find it a little difficult to place all the blame at the 
feet of the Dapper implementation.  I had a working Breezy install, that 
I did successfully upgrade, but I had problems.  This was back at Flight 
3 that I upgraded.  I have found and seen that the greatest amounts of 
problems with the Breezy to Dapper upgrade happen on things that have 
been fixed by the user in Breezy. 

There are a lot of new features that are working very well in Dapper 
that needed to be hacked/compiled in Breezy.  Invariably, the things I 
notice that are broken on upgrade are those hacked/compiled modules. 

This is because the "package" installed to give the functionality in 
Breezy was not managed by the package manager.  Thus, during the upgrade 
the files are still there, and create conflicts with the packages that 
now provide that feature.  There are two ways to deal with this.  One is 
to install from scratch, and the other is to go through your bugs, one 
by one, and fix them all.

There are a couple other problems with Dapper; however, they tend to be 
associated with RestrictedFormats or firmware redistribution issues.  
Generally things that Ubuntu can't really fix itself.

My personal recommendation:
run 'dpkg --get-selections > installed-packages.txt' to create a list of 
your installed applications
Install Dapper from scratch (hopefully you have a separate /home 
partition, or you'll need to back it up, and reload it after.)
run 'dpkg --set-selections < installed-packages.txt' to get your 
applications back.

There may be issues with doing things this way as well, but I believe 
that it will help the core functionality to install itself cleanly, and 
benefit from the new features and scripts that the Dapper install has to 
offer.

If you are wondering if a clean install will be worth the effort, I 
recommend using the desktop CD to see if everything on your machine 
works properly.  It is not a guarantee, but it is a good indication of 
what will work and what won't.

I would recommend not installing from the desktop CD, though, as it is 
not as flexible an installer as the alternate install CD.  This is 
personal preference, but I like the extra options the alternate install 
CD gives.

I am sorry that this does not really directly address either of your 
problems, but unfortunately (for you, not me...) they have not happened 
to me, and so I cannot give any advice.

Just to add a little information to the problems you are experiencing, 
on upgrading using apt-get update and dist-upgrade, the update-manager 
application was put together because the devs were aware that there were 
going to be issues with the dist-upgrade path.  The update-manager 
attempts to deal with these issues better than the simple dist-upgrade does.

For wireless, it is _really_ difficult to help without knowing the brand 
and type of the wireless card itself.  Sometimes it is as simple as 
pointing to the fwcutter utility, but other times it requires removing 
drivers, and setting up ndiswrappers.  BTW, if your wireless was using 
an ndiswrapper before, it will almost certainly need to be set up again 
after upgrade.

HTH,
-Matt





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