[ILUG] My Dapper story

[Paul O'Malley]

Brendan Halpin wrote:

> I responded to the Dapper announcement like a true sucker, and tried
> "apt-get  dist-upgrade" from Hoary. After much faffing and trouble,
> and forcing and fumbling I finally got a result: a boot process that
> stopped at the "Waiting for root filesystem" message :-(
>
> Reinstalling Hoary from the CD is a good learning experience, and I
> have reasonably good notes of the solutions to the many little puzzles
> (e.g. how to get beyond 640*480), but one detail is holding me back.
> The institution's internal network shifted a lot of the internal stuff
> to 10.X.*.* addresses, and I'm having trouble setting up the network.
> How do I configure it to have 123.45.*.* as the externally visible
> part of the network, and 10.78.*.* as the internal (with DNS and so on
> in the 10.78.0.0 zone)?
>
> I've tried numerous "route add" incantations but none of them gets the
> desired result...is route even the best way of doing this?
>
> Regards,
>
> Brendan
>
> PS I'd much prefer to be Wrassling with it...

Hi Brendan,

Let me sum up my feelings on the above with the sound "ooch".

The supported upgrade route from hoary is a two step one, via breezy.
Regardless of personal choice when it comes to upgrades the metapackage
ubuntu-desktop
should be in place for the upgrade, it just makes life simpler.
(This is a pity but a reality if you want to do customise a lot.)

Noting your networking issue and assuming as standard a wired network.
 From the menu: System -> Administration -> Networking
(I think it was there in hoary, however it may have been a preferences 
thing back then.)

If that fails I think you may need new network cards.
This conclusion is something I came to after working on a friends 
computer, where I Ubuntu would not work with networking, new card (i.e. 
€10 or something like that,) and up it came working away no issues.

There are many online resources however in order of preference these are 
mine.
help.ubuntu.com
wiki.ubuntu.com
official Debian documentation,
www.ubuntuforums.org

I suggest you stay away from the ubuntuguide and easylinux, the former 
was badly out of date and was notorious for broken systems.
Stay away from automatix - it does not just work in all cases and it has 
a bad reputation for breaking in new and interesting ways.
The program overwrites configuration files, and uses constructs such as 
"echo -e 'y\nY\n'" which is considered risky, if apt-get wants to fail 
it has good reasons. It replaces the default sources list, so if it 
fails your not wise about it, it does not work with suggested best 
practice methods.

(Sorry got carried away. ;-))

There is "easyubuntu" if you want to do the codec dance, however is it 
better to use the documentation.

Personally if an upgrade fails it may be faster to burn the dapper disk 
and work from there.
My approach to upgrades is to have a live CD test the box, so you may 
know the issues, if it works burn the install  CD, change the sources 
file, try to "sudo apt-get udate&& sudo apt-get dist-upgrade", but it 
just might be faster to install from scratch, if you have several 
machines then having them work on the updates one at a time over the 
network can be useful, porting the local upgrade repositories around the 
place works.

Anyway there are some notes.

irc.freenode.net #ubuntu is a bit crazy at the moment ~ 0.9k users but 
if your really stuck it can be useful.
Most of the regular answers are in the channel bot ubotu.
/msg ubotu listvals Keyword
will return the factoids with the keyword in them.

For those who think they should use root, it is my contention that life 
is _generally_ easier without it.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RootSudo

Regards,
Paul O'Malley