Gutsy upgrade borked

[Justin Gruenberg]

On 10/20/07, NoOp <glgxg at mfire.com> wrote:
> Well I decided to upgrade my last primary system to Gutsy... what a
> mistake that's been.
>
> All seemed to go as well as the other Gutsy upgrades (3 other systems);
> finished and then rebooted. Nothing worked - booting from the older
> Feisty kernel allowed me to get to a tty screen. apt-get -f install:
> errors all over the place. dpgk --configure -a so may errors that I
> can't even decide which ones to remove. I've gone round & round trying
> to find the problem. Disappointing; perhaps there was something in my
> old Feisty config that caused the problem, but whatever it was should
> have come up during the online upgrade. Bottom line is that the system
> is hosed and I've given up and the system is in the process of a
> reinstall. Note: the other upgrades didn't go well either, but I figured
> that was due to the beta status of the distro.
>
> At the same time I was given an IBM T21 Thinkpad today. Cool... I have
> Gutsy running on an A21 Thinkpad - basically the same laptops, only the
> A21 has a broken screen so I've been running it off of a docking
> station. No problem I say; the T21 has Windows 2000 Pro running & works
> fine. I swap the hard drives; the Win2KP comes up just fine in the A21,
> the T21 with the Gutsy drive piddles about for awhile and finally comes
> up in 800 x big icon mode. Can't get things to work & spend an hour
> before finally reconfiguring /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually to get me back
>  on track. Finally get a decent screen, but come to find out that my
> fixed IP setting are borked, so spend another hour fixing that. And lo &
> behold I can finally post this bitch on the list!
>
> I think that most on this list know that I've gotten pretty good at
> installing/reinstalling/borking Ubuntu, but at this point I'm seriously
> considering going back to M$. Sent my kid off to college with a Feisty
> install on his computer and now I don't dare upgrading the system
> remotely.  Thank goodness that I was smart enough do a dual boot config
> on that machine so that WinXPP is useable in the event of an Ubuntu failure.
>
> Sorry to bitch (enter Mario, et al :-) but I've just about reached the
> end of my rope spending hours & hours & days & days screwing around with
> this distro. It works once you get it tuned and working, but then Ubuntu
> can't fix basic application issues (like OpenOffice etc) on the existing
> distro so you are forced to upgrade to the latest distro (fine stay on
> LTS and work with OOo 2.x out of date not working version etc).
>
> I'm off to reformat & reinstall Windows on the other system...


There's some good tips for the T21 at thinkwiki:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_on_a_ThinkPad_T21

Why remotely upgrade your kids computer?  Use a LTS version?  Or
upgrade it when they come home?  If they're not the kind of person to
fiddle with all the settings, they're probably not going to care if
their applications are a few versions behind.