A Gutsy upgrade story part 2

[David Vincent]

the laptops are done.  now its time to upgrade my mythtv frontend, my 
fileserver, and my desktop.

mythtv frontend:

p3-800, 1gb ram,, ATI 9200SE 128mb GPU, otherwise a generic pc. 
painless upgrade from the alternate-cd with updates from the internet. 
as expected, my gatos drivers for tv-out on the ati card broke so the 
display didn't work.  the new screens applet kicked in and let me get to 
a desktop.  it also gave the impression that it had let me configure the 
radeon driver for tv out properly (finally!) and at a higher res than 
before.

sadly it only broke my xorg.conf and never worked properly.  i 
recompiled the gatos drivers and fixed my xorg.conf manually and 
everything came back just fine.

other annoyances are i had to chmod +s /sbin/halt so my frontend could 
shutdown from the menu again, and my power settings and screensaver 
settings were overwritten.

file server:

p3-650, 512mb ram, ATI RageIIC GPU, and a pretty generic pc.  this is 
just an old pc with three drives in it configured as a raid-5 volume. 
they're old 30gig drives i had laying around so i turned them into a 
60gig volume for whatever.  as soon as a drive fails i'll replace it 
with a usb volume but for now 60gig is tons of space for us and building 
a raid-5 was good experience.  mdadm is awesome in its simplicity.

this was also a painless upgrade, everything just worked.  nfs had no 
problems.  samba too.  the shared printer works without a hitch.  (hp 
laserjet 5)

power options were again overwritten.

desktop:

p4-3.2ghz with 2gb ram, and my most hated video card - an ATI Radeon 
X550 PCIx.  this card has always been a problem for me - it renders 
video poorly and drivers seem to hate it.  the specs were recently 
released to the open source community tho so hopefully soon it will suck 
less.

my dual-head broke.  i had a working fglrx display and had i read the 
release notes i would have known it would happen, but i didn't.

http://blogs.gnome.org/jamesh/2007/09/24/gutsy-upgrade/

...got me working for now.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/displayconfig-gtk/+bug/153890

...seems to be the bug which bit me.  i tried using envy to install the 
latest ATI proprietary drivers and while those worked i couldn't get 
dual-head working again.  all this really means to me is i don't have a 
working Google Earth on this machine - it seems to fallback to software 
rendering under the ATI open source driver.  anyone know a fix?

my vmware server broke, and isn't in the partner repo yet so i don't 
have my vms back yet.  this is REALLY annoying.  meanwhile this link 
seems to help:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=579347

aaand my power options were overwritten - AGAIN!

other than that things are fine on each machine.  as usual - the places 
i customize are the places which broke.  proprietary stuff broke before 
open-source stuff.

next is the mythtv backend and my alienware laptop....woo-hoo!

-d