Three Wise Men

I was postponing this for quite some time. The main reason is that I have a hacked-together-don’t-do-this-at-home version of Ubuntu 8.10 with a lot of things that were compiled from sources and installed or installed from got-knows-where-I-got-them .deb packages. So this is risky business for me. I want to upgrade, but I don’t want to render my system inoperable¹. I wanted to do a clean install from scratch but I ran out of blank CD/DVD’s. Seriously, I did.

I will run my upgrade now and I’ll be updating this post as I go. Addind screen shots and other stuff that might be interesting.

So, excuse my typos and grammatical failures. I’ll be doing the cleanup later, when I’m finished.

First things first, let’s see what is going on with disks and if there is any space left for upgrade.

df -h

Interesting, my /home is gone. Of course, I needed it when I was installing Mac OS X. So, what if something goes wrong and I’ll have to reinstall? Backups? Backups are for pussies. Google keeps all my important data backed up and they indexed it forever too! ;) I better take a look at what needs to be upgraded.

192 packets in the queue ...

Oh, a shiny new distro ...

Let’s press upgrade and see what happenes.

There was some munching and some crunching and the result?

1400 packages!

Ooooh. Only 1400 packages to upgrade? Lovely, lovely, lovely! One hour and one minute. Such a pretty, nice, round number. Will I ran out of diskspace? With 3.6GB free? I shouldn’t!

Now the fun starts!

So, I put my internet connection into over-burn mode and I am using all 2Mbps that are available to me. Yes, yes, I know. Only 2Mbps link to my house it is a disgrace. Two and a half years ago, before the house was built, came one of the ISP‘s and they offered fiber! FTTH! Hell yeah baby, 20/20 line for me! They dug up the street, the whole town actually, and I have a box built in the wall of the house with their logo on it and an empty underground pipe leading to it. There is also a manhole on the street in front of the house which serves as a junction and a fiber cable will go from that manhole to my house. Someday. Someday, …

Right now, we’re at 297 packets out of 1510. 54 minutes remaning. Bored? Me too.

Good old tower defense games

And now upgrade will actually start. I expect things to start randomly dying on me.

Upgrade in progress

I suffered one Firefox crash already. Otherwise things are running smoothly.

8 Minutes remaining and I suffered a post install script crash for linux-image. Oh cool, no kernel for me! This will teach me not to click on Three Way Merge which is marked as experimental. Finished. The result is this:

Whoops, I did it again?

And now I’ll reboot the whole thing, to see what I got. Interestingly, reboot went out smoothly, with kexec and computer didn’t need a restart. Yes, I do realize I could switch to splash screen, but I enjoy text mode lines scrolling onad and on. :)

All good so far

Reboot complete and everything works

I was a little surprised when I found out that eveything is working like it should. Apart from the kernel failing to install, which was my mistake², everything worked Upgrade program repeated kernel installation and that was all.

I already tried running most of the applications that I am using, it seems that everything is working. Aren’t I lucky? ;)

The conclusion? Ubuntu upgrade actually works. I am sure that people are having problems with it and things can get messy, but for an average user with average harware shouldn’t be to difficult.

Did I mention how much I like digging and stumbling? Digg me if you dig me and stumble me too! ;)

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