A Gutsy upgrade story

Tue Oct 16 06:50:41 UTC 2007

I have a nice workstation that I tried to upgrade tonight. I don't have hard drive space enough in /boot partition though, so I'll wait until it's an official dist. and use the cd image to re-partition.

Cheers,
-Dee
  _____  

From: David Vincent [mailto:dvincent at sleepdeprived.ca]
To: Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions [mailto:ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com]
Sent: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:23:38 -0800
Subject: A Gutsy upgrade story

Hi List.

  I spent today upgrading my two crappiest laptops to Xubuntu 7.10 and 
  wanted to share some of my thoughts with you.  Both were u pdated by 
  running "update-manager -d" as suggested in the Ubuntu pages on 
  upgrading to the RC of 7.10.  Both of these were fresh installed from 
  the 7.04 alternate CD and only used software from the Ubuntu 
  repositories - no hand compiling etc. etc.  Also no fancy graphics or 
  anything here either - NeoMagic MagicGraph GPUs (I know - eww!) and all 
  open source drivers for everything except the wireless cards.  Both use 
  DLink DWL-G630 cards which need the Atheros driver found in the 
  linux-restricted-modules package.  For various reasons my wireless 
  network uses WEP 128bit - don't get on me about it, I know exactly what 
  I am doing and why.

  Laptop #1 is an IBM e390 - P2-300 with 256mb RAM.  It supports ACPI and 
  when running Feisty had problems properly suspending and hibernating 
  mostly to do with bringing the network back up when it resumed.  I was 
  able to make it work for hibernation by editing the hibernate.sh script 
  and adding a line reading "ifdown ath0".  I also had to add "acpi-force" 
  to my /boot/grub/menu.lst file in the appropriate spots so the machine 
  would shutdown and otherwise manage the power properly.

  Under Gutsy suspend and hibernate work flawlessly.  Power up and power 
  down work flawlessly.  My network reconnects without any problems.  I 
  still need to force ACPI support as the BIOS is from 1999 and fails the 
  cutoff date.  In fact this machine seems to be working better after the 
  upgrade.  I played with it for a few hours and surfed the net a bit 
  which is really all this machine does anymore so that feeling may 
  change.  The only issue I have is suddenly XFCE is demanding a password 
  when I resume from suspend or hibernation.  Weird.

  Laptop #2 is a Dell Inspiron 3200 of equal vintage to the first.  It has 
  less RAM at 140mb and is a little slower at 266mhz but actually feels 
  snappier than the IBM - probably from the 512k L2 cache (the IBM has 256k).

  Under Feisty this laptop would not hibernate.  It would suspend but 
  never bring the network back up requiring a "sudo ifdown ath0 && sudo 
  ifup ath0" in a terminal and sometimes that wouldn't even work.  It lost 
  its swapfile one time and after a resume from suspend sometimes Firefox 
  would race for a while, consume the whole CPU and generally be a pain in 
  the ass.  Manually bringing down the network before suspend didn't help, 
  but making sure Firefox was closed before trying any fancy power stuff 
  always was a good idea.  I was ready to get rid of this machine thinking 
  it had some hardware problems.

  Under Gutsy all my problems are gone.  Suspend works.  Hibernate works. 
    Firefox no longer races.  This machine is noticeably faster than 
  before.  I used it for a few hours surfing the web and enjoyed it again. 
    With the network problems gone I can again use it as a house laptop 
  for anyone to pop onto and surf the web.

  Issues under Gutsy include not upgrading my Flash Player during the 
  install (should it?  I installed it originally via the 
  ubuntu-restricted-extras package and since that package has been 
  upgraded and the version of Flash has incremented since then I feel 
  Ubuntu should have upgraded this software along the way.  I may be wrong 
  about that...) and also suddenly requiring a password when it resumes 
  from suspend or hibernation.  Editing /etc/default/acpi-support and 
  commenting out the LOCK_SCREEN=true line fixed this problem on the Dell 
  but not the IBM - weird.

  Also as long as I use the power management software to suspend/hibernate 
  I'm ok, but if I use my Dell's Suspend button the machine locks and 
  requires me to remove the batteries to get it back - this worked under 
  Feisty.  :)

  Also NetworkManager now comes in Xubuntu but still has the same problem 
  for me as it has since Edgy.  I can connect to a WPA network.  I can 
  connect to a non-encrypted network.  I CANNOT connect to a WEP network. 
    I have to disable roaming mode and instead put in the wireless key 
  etc. manually.  This is a pain in the ass and I was really hoping Gutsy 
  would fix it finally.

  Next week I will be upgrading my fileserver and MythTV box too which 
  should be fun.  Then the laptop and the desktop PC will be last as they 
  are the ones with the most customization.  Depending on how this thread 
  is received I may post some more info on my experience with those boxes. 
    One has a software RAID-5 which should be fun to mess around with.  :) 
    I'd better take some backups first.

  Anyone else want to share their Gutsy upgrade stories?

  -d

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