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Ubuntu upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04

Sonneteer — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:44:33 GMT

Since I have about a billion 3rd party applications installed, the upgrade process can be somewhat interesting at times. This time around I uninstalled acroread first, since in previous upgrades, that package has caused the upgrade process to abort.
Now that my internet is on Shaw instead of Telus, the download time was pretty short. But then the upgrade seemed to be stuck for a long time at the same point, it was not until I expanded the terminal that I found there was an ncurses dialog box waiting for my input (if I didn't see that little arrow by "Terminal", we could have been waiting for each other for a long time).
So once it was finally going again, the actual upgrading was going to take awhile, but I can't just leave it with Ubuntu, because it's always asking me about whether I want to keep or replace custom config files. There's probably a way to automatically answer those if running via the command line, but there was no option that presented itself through the GUI. I much prefer the way it works on Slackware, where you can let it update everything by itself, and slackpkg will prompt you about each of the new config files only once that is all done.

Once the upgrade was all said and done, of course I had to investigate the new features.
The first thing, that was terribly annoying, was the way my mouse had to fight to move between my two monitors. This was easy enough to fix through the unity plugin settings of the CompizConfig, by turning "Launcher Edge Stop Overcome Pressure" down to 5 and "Edge Stop Velocity" to 10. (I can see how a higher pressure might be useful if I had the launcher on both screens, but rather than a second launcher, I'm running gkrellm there.)
The new privacy settings were nowhere to be found--apparently I had uninstalled the "ubuntu-desktop" meta package at some point in the past, so installing that pulled in the new stuff I was looking for.
Had to open up the Advanced Settings to reset the Window decoration theme back to the way I had it.
I liked the new icon theme in the panel, but the icons on the launcher were not so hot. In particular, the default Gnome icon theme was missing the workspace-switcher icon, so it was just an ugly folder sitting in my launcher for the switcher. Installation of the "gnome-icon-theme-extras" package fixed that though. (If Unity needs one of those icons, shouldn't that be in the "full" package instead of relegated to "extras"?)

I kept getting crash reports about virtualbox installation (even though I wasn't trying to run it) until I went back to virtualbox.org, from whence I got the previous version, and downloaded the Precise Pangolin version.

Mupen64plus was updated to the newer version, which does not have a gui. In order to reconfigure my controller I grabbed the ~/.config/mupen64plus/blight_input.conf file from my backup and used it as a reference to adjust the settings in ~/.config/mupen64plus/mupen64plus.cfg

So those have been my adventures so far on this upgrade :)

Upgrade Ubuntu from Jaunty to Karmic

Sonneteer — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 03:55:34 GMT

My first attempt to upgrade to Karmic was met with an error about ubuntu-minimal missing. The problem being the mirror I had selected was not synced with the new distro yet. (The "Select Best Server" option probably thought it was a good mirror precisely because nobody was downloading thousands of packages from it yet) So after switching to a different mirror, the upgrade went pretty smoothly.

In addition to the improvements one can find on many another review, a few things I was pleased about were as follows:
Updated nvidia driver. In Jaunty, glxgears gave me an fps around 8000. I had thought this was pretty good after coming from an old laptop that gave me 14 fps. On Karmic glxgears now gives me 41000 fps (with my nvidia GeForce 9800 GT).
digiKam had had a broken editor for me in Jaunty where the photos would not show up at all and I had to resort to gwenview for some quick editing work. The updated version of digiKam in Karmic is working perfectly though.

A couple of things that did not go as well:
There were some serious issues with sound. Songbird was giving gstreamer errors in the terminal and gave no audio output. A number of other players, as well as games, were also not outputting sound.
In search of an audio player that would work besides mpd, I installed banshee. Apt installed the following dependencies for it: banshee libboo2.0-cil libclutter-1.0-0 libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil libnotify0.4-cil libtaglib2.0-cil podsleuth
after this install both songbird and blobAndConquer were able to output audio again.

gnome-power-manager kept showing up in my kde system tray as an empty space, and would respawn if I killed it. Fixed this by logging into gnome and finding the power manger settings and told it to never show an icon.

The RSS plasma widget which I have on the screensaver no longer remembers its size and always reverts back to its default setting which is too small.
The Parley plasma widget still does not remember font selection between logins.

upgrade to Slackware 12.2

Sonneteer — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:00:28 GMT

The upgrade from slack 12.1 to slack 12.2 went fairly well. There were only a few issues, mostly with third party packages.

On the first boot, rc.serial made a lot of output complaining of nonexistant devices. But this was only a one time occurrence.

fbpager no longer works with the new fluxbox, but there has been some recent development with fbpager so there may be a new release at some point that will solve this. Tried fluxter with no success. For now I have switched to ipager. My issue with ipager is that I can't see anything in the config that could make it arranged in two rows instead of one (horizontally), so I need to make it rather small if I want to keep it in the vertical slit with gkrellm. (The pager plugin for gkrellm is too plain looking to me (text with LEDs) compared to the typical graphical pager that shows where the windows are.)

Slackware's Firefox had issues (symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgnome-2.so.0: undefined symbol: g_dgettext) with the libgnome package from dropline 2.24.1 beta, and it wouldn't start until I uninstalled the libgnome package.

I also no longer seem able to access the third level shift keys from within firefox. This was annoying as I have some passwords (especially the master) that used symbols from the third level.

While I was in XFCE, the gam_server process suddenly started taking the CPU up to 100% and it refused to be killed. After a hard reboot I removed the gamin package, but konqueror seems to depend on it so I reinstalled it. But it hasn't acted up again since.

Back to mrxvt

Sonneteer — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 04:20:28 GMT

So after I upgraded to Slackware 12 from 11, this strange problem arose with Eterm. I could use vim a couple of times, then thereafter it would not work. I'd type in the command, and the cursor would go to the next line and just sit there. I couldn't type in anything, couldn't even Ctrl-C out of it and would have to close the window. It would continue to behave this way until I rebooted. Other things such as the links browser would also not work, but text editing with elvis still functioned fine.
Having no idea how to track down the cause of this, I gave up and went back to using mrxvt, which has tabs anyway. (I had stopped using mrxvt when I had gone back to using KDE because I'd use its native konsole, but had since moved to fluxbox, installing Eterm for the suggested Esetroot program).
I quickly discovered that mrxvt has a configuration file (~/.mrxvtrc) where options can be kept instead of using a long command line. So here's what I have in my .mrxvtrc at the moment:

Code:

Mrxvt.geometry: 134x31+0+122
Mrxvt.foreground: grey
Mrxvt.textShadow: black
Mrxvt.transparent: True
Mrxvt.shading: 75
Mrxvt.showMenu: False
Mrxvt.transparentMenubar: True
Mrxvt.bottomTabbar: True
Mrxvt.transparentTabbar: True
Mrxvt.tabBackground: black
Mrxvt.tabForeground: white
Mrxvt.itabBackground: #000000
Mrxvt.itabForeground: #808080
Mrxvt.transparentScrollbar: True
Mrxvt.scrollbarStyle: plain
Mrxvt.scrollbarThickness: 10
Mrxvt.scrollbarFloating: True
Mrxvt.troughColor: #000000
Mrxvt.saveLines: 500
Mrxvt.appIcon: /usr/share/pixmaps/mrxvt.xpm

The colouring of the scrollbar (troughColor) only seems to work when the scrollbarStyle is set to plain, which was a bit annoying, but otherwise this gives me a terminal the way I like it to look when under X.

kernel patching

Sonneteer — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:03:52 GMT

So the concept of patching the kernel to update to the next release is something I haven't delved into too much before. I've had previous experiences of trying to use the patch command that didn't go over too well. The syntax of the patch command is something that is simple when understood. Yet being slightly different from other commands, it can look a bit scary to a newbie. For instance, what number am I supposed to put with the p? But when I actually sat down to try it, it was actually quite easy to figure out. So here's the new section that I have now added to my kernel script:

Code:

patch)
if [ ! -e patch-$NEWVERSION ]; then
wget http://www.rafal.lkams.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-$NEWVERSION.gz
        gunzip patch-$NEWVERSION.gz
cd linux-$VERSION
        patch -p1 <../patch-$NEWVERSION
                make silentoldconfig
cd $ROOTSRC
        mv linux-$VERSION linux-$NEWVERSION
        sed -i -e s/^VERSION\=.*/VERSION=$NEWVERSION/ josh.kernel
fi

if [ ! -d $DAZUKODIR ]; then
        cd $ROOTSRC
                wget http://www.dazuko.de/files/dazuko-$DAZUKO.tar.gz
                        tar -zxpf dazuko-$DAZUKO.tar.gz && rm dazuko-$DAZUKO.tar.gz
fi
;;

So for the p, I guess just stick with 1, unless you know what you're doing otherwise?
the patch command uses a "<" where other commands would use something such as "-i"