Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

My 9.10 upgrade on my desktop finally happened...delayed by domain 
thefts and complications creating a bare metal backup (more on that in 
another post). Just in time for 10.04 to be released. :-)

David Kramer wrote:
> - I had Grub set up to verbose, and it overwrote it to not only not tell
> me what's happening during boot, but this intensely ugly MythBuntu screen
> stays up during the boot process,  and I didn't even install MythBuntu!  I
> really need to track this one down.

Did you get this resolved? I did run across info talking about settings 
in /etc/default/grub controlling the splash screen. I noticed after the 
upgrade the text console display had been replaced by an Ubuntu splash 
screen. I haven't tried fixing it yet.


> I do use nVidia proprietary driver on all three machines, and all three
> worked fine.

Graphics seems fine so far. My GNOME theme appeared wrong, though. I 
went into Appearance to check the settings, which still seemed to be my 
custom settings, but while playing around something changed and all the 
windows updated to my expected theme. Odd.


> - As usual, sound was misconfigured and I had to take off mute and find
> the mixer.  Speaking of which, the panel applet to adjust the volume and
> bring up the mixer won't run on one of my systems.

And Bill Bogstad wrote:
> Oh, I forgot to mention sound.  As seems to be the case with any Linux
> system I've touched in years, it was a pain. It's more or less working again.

9.10 was the first version to support my Aspire 8930G's sound hardware 
out of the box and not require custom building an Alsa module. But in 
less than 24 hours of run time, pulseaudio hung, and required a 
--kill/--start cycle to restore audio.

What happened to the config settings in the Sound applet that let you 
choose ALSA instead of pulseaudio as the output device?

I had previously installed the PulseAudio Applet to help diagnose 
problems with it under 9.04 (before I ceased or minimized use of it), 
and the manager dialog shows what client applications are using it. I 
see Pidgin had nearly a dozen connections open. That doesn't seem right.


> I ended up removing/reinputting my wireless keys on the laptop.

Wireless worked fine for me. Though in the past I've had to re-enter 
credentials on occasion.


> My Myth BE is still running 0.21 so my biggest problem was with the
> FE software.  I ended up installing the 9.04 FE debs and the result
> is acceptable.

I'll have to do likewise. My MythTV server is getting long in the tooth, 
and I think I'm going to migrate it to new hardware and the next LTS 
version of Ubuntu. I'll upgrade MythTV versions at that time.


> As for the other issues that you noted, my biggest concern was with
> grub and I had no problems with either machine.

My approach of upgrading to grub2 worked as far as having a bootable 
machine, but it did cause package installation failures. Both the kernel 
package and the memtest86+ package failed to install due to the 
update-grub script failing.

It apparently calls /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober, which attempted to probe 
all drives on the system to see what OS is on them. It would find my 
(internal) backup drive with Ubuntu 9.04 on it, and then inexplicably 
exit with a non-zero status, which would cause the calling script to 
fail. No warnings or error messages. It appears 9.10 includes a 
substantially different version of this script, but I didn't learn that 
until after I had resolved the problem. (I'll have to test it and file a 
bug if it still fails.)

I eventually just hacked the script to exit immediately, as I had no 
desire for grub to do anything with that drive. I manually completed the 
installation of the kernel, and ran aptitude upgrade, which then picked 
up a flood of additional packages that were apparently contingent upon 
the kernel.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/