Followed a suggestion in one of the messages I saw and ran the Ubuntu update-manager with the following:
gksu "update-manager -c"
Over 24 hours downloading the 1880 or so packages, then started answering the installer’s questions on Sunday. Quite a few offers to replace configuration files with new ones from packages, most I accepted, apart from the ones where I knew I’d made changes.
An hour or two of this and then the installer couldn’t replace the existing postgresql8.1, turned up its toes and died, politely informing me that my system was probably now completely unstable and unbootable!
Crossed fingers, ran apt-get a few times, removed postgresql8.1 manually and then apt-get -u dist-upgrade. All seemed ok, so I rebooted and luckily everything worked.
Only one problem detected afterwards, the privoxy settings had been reset and it wasn’t using tor any more.
previously at http://www-personal.monash.edu.au/~ajft/systems/fafnir/fafnir-20061031
