I logged in this morning to see the updater telling me that a partial upgrade was available, which I thought unusual as that’s usually for the xx04 or xx10 version changeovers. Hit “OK” and it started, then popped up a huge error box across the screen telling me I had no desktop installed (none of ubuntu-desktop or many others, not recorded). Gnome then exited, back to a console login. Manually installed ubuntu-desktop which pulled in a whole bunch of packages that I’d seen removed.

I logged in this morning to see the updater telling me that a partial upgrade was available, which I thought unusual as that’s usually for the xx04 or xx10 version changeovers. Hit “OK” and it started, then popped up a huge error box across the screen telling me I had no desktop installed (none of ubuntu-desktop or many others, not recorded). Gnome then exited, back to a console login. Manually installed ubuntu-desktop which pulled in a whole bunch of packages that I’d seen removed.

Ubuntu nastiness – partial upgrade killed the gnome desktop

Logged in this morning to see the updater telling me that a partial upgrade was available, which I thought unusual as that’s usually for the xx04 or xx10 version changeovers. Hit “ok” and it started, then popped up a huge error box across the screen telling me I had no desktop instaled (none of ubuntu-desktop or many others, not recorded). Gnome then exited, back to a console login. Manually installed ubuntu-desktop which pulled in a whole bunch of packages that I’d seen removed.

Stumbled over a pointer to running microk8s on a cluster of raspberry pi systems and it looked interesting – probably about time I got a bit of hands-on experience with kubernetes. No handy rpi system at the moment so I installed it on the ubuntu box and started working my way through very basic “Getting started” info at https://microk8s.io/docs. Can’t seem to get it to work. It installs, but the basic first set of tasks fails at:

OK, I think I broke it. Too much reliance on zfs being the fix for cheap componentry and haphazard procedures. The home PC has an SSD boot drive and a zpool made of three disks – a 2x1TB mirror and 1x3TB, it was supposed to be four disks but the cabling and power supply never let me add the mirror disk to the second vdev. Backup is through the Ubuntu backup program, to an external USB drive.

It went clack, clack, clack, clack, CLACK. Then it stopped. Part way through a very ordinary ubuntu package upgrade the hard disk in fafnir made an horrendous sound and the PC froze. It wouldn’t respond to a soft restart, it wouldn’t respond to a hard reset, it wouldn’t even come back up after powering off and on. The hard disk has had it. A single consumer-grade IDE disk running almost continually in a desktop machine since about June 2004, what can I say, it was bound to fail eventually.

Yay, finally! After four months of battling “Ubuntu who knows best,” I’ve finally managed to convince it to reinstall a current NVidia driver that works on my PC and gives me back the 1280x1024 resolution that I’d been using for four or five years! For some reason the 8.10 upgrade had removed all traces of the NVidia packages and refused to recognise that I had hardware that could use them.

Back in October I upgraded my Ubuntu system from 8.04 to 8.10 and as seems to happen far too often, once again something went wrong. This time it removed the nvidia support that has been running for years and all of a sudden I can only run X at a resolution of 1152x864 instead of 1280x1024.

I seem to have a semi-workable system after I started using the Feisty Fawn update of Ubuntu before it was released.

About a year ago I learnt a lot about the wonders of LVM and what it could do for me, and as a result I very carefully transferred the /home, /var and swap partitions of my home PC from physical partitions into the LVM. Tempting fate this last year has been the last part of that task — to split the root partition into “/” and “/boot” and to move the root into LVM as well….

Further along the track to recovery from the disastrous attempt to move / into LVM. I’ve reinstalled ubuntu-desktop after quite a few false starts, acpid gave me grief, as well as other DEBs that were in the file system but not present in the DEB database. Installing Beryl as per. http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu_Feisty fixed most of my initial problems. ajft@fafnir:~/doc/downloads$ sudo apt-get -fV install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information.

Attempting to import photos into my Ubuntu system with f-spot, the import window opens, but contains the text: An error occurred in the io-library (‘Bad parameters’): Could not find USB device (vendor 0x4a9, product 0x30f2). Make sure this device is connected to the computer. Something is definitely wrong with the permissions, my account can’t read the camera, but root can: ajft@fafnir:/dev/bus/usb$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05a9:0511 OmniVision Technologies, Inc.

The ubuntu upgrade I started yesterday morning has completed on fafnir, or at least initially completed. Now all I have to do is find all the software that broke and fix it…. Minor problems during the upgrade itself: gettext-el failed to install sawfish failed to install upgrade-manager failed to install The first two seemed to be because they were looking for /usr/lib/X11/locale, and there isn’t one anymore, things are in /usr/share/X11/locale.

Followed a suggestion in one of the messages I saw and ran the Ubuntu update-manager with the following:

gksu "update-manager -c"

Ubuntu upgrade yesterday, reboot this morning. Still had the -23 and -25 revision kernels hanging around so I removed them.

Warning: the string include-menu-defs did not occur in template file /etc/X11/twm//system.twmrc-menu

Finally managed to find the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperUpgrades page on how to upgrade the ubuntu system from Breezy to Dapper online, I would have thought it would be easier to locate, but every page I saw seemed to be based on downloading a CD and installing or upgrading that way.

Two steps forward, one backwards. Typical computer upgrades.

The Debian to Ubuntu upgrade kind-of sort-of maybe mostly partly worked. I’ve been finding things that it didn’t upgrade, and things that it should have upgraded.

Nearly fully recovered from the failed experiment into Ubuntu, Debian has finally finished downloading all the packages that it wants to turn the machine back into a Debian “testing” box, and by choosing their 2.6.8-2-686-smp kernel, I’ve got my network card back.

Updates on my progress at getting fafnir converted to ubuntu:

Here we go, head first without first testing the depth! I’ve decided to try and upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu linux. All the arguments that seem to be raised all seem to apply. Debian unstable is too unstable. Debian stable is too old.