Upgrading to Ubuntu 6.06

June 16, 2006    Misc

I’ve been a Linux user for about six years now; I started out with Red Hat while I was in college, and then a little over a year ago I jumped ship to Ubuntu because smart people kept talking about how nice it was.

Overall, my experiences with Ubuntu have lived up to that; Ubuntu does an amazing job of being both a great development platform and a good desktop operating system. That’s no mean feat. So naturally I was looking forward to upgrading to the recently-released version 6.06, code-named “Dapper Drake”, but I’d been putting it off a bit for a couple of reasons:

• There’s always a huge rush on the package repositories when an upgrade is released, and I don’t like having to wait ten or twelve hours for the packages to download.
• Even though the official releases of Ubuntu are always highly polished, I never upgrade software immediately; I generally wait a week or two to make sure no show-stopping bugs creep up.

Tonight I figured it’d be a good time to upgrade, so I popped open the updater and told it to do its stuff. The following are my thoughts, recorded as the process went on and copied/pasted in to this entry.

• Just started the upgrade. The estimated time to download and install everything keeps going up.
• OK, now it’s stabilized. About two hours, I can live with that.

At this point I wandered away to do other things. We pick up again about two hours later:

• The updater has been patiently waiting for me to tell it whether it can overwrite my hdparm.conf (which I’d edited to make sure DMA turns on at boot, for smoother DVD playback). Tell it to keep my version of the file, and now it estimates 45 minutes remaining. I hope the developers don’t seriously expect me to spend two hours watching this updater to make sure it’s told whether it can overwrite a couple configuration files.
• About thirty minutes later, came back to check on the updater again. Now it’s waiting to find out if it can overwrite my gdm.conf. I don’t honestly remember what I changed in there, so it must not be important. Overwrite away. Now estimates twenty minutes remaining, which means I didn’t keep it waiting too long this time.
• Ten minutes later, come back and it’s popped up an error configuring tetex-base; the dialog box says “the upgrade will be aborted”. Well, crap. Click “OK”. The updater keeps on going. That’s a definition of “aborted” I’ve not encountered before; I guess it was referring only to the upgrade of tetex-base, not the system as a whole. Estimates ten minutes remaining.
• Five minutes later, come back and the dialog looks different. It’s reverted to the ugly default GTK theme, which could be good (it successfully updated the theme system but can’t restart the GNOME settings manager to find out what theme I want until everything’s updated and I reboot) or bad (something broke). Hoping it’s the former. Estimates seven minutes remaining.
• Ten minutes later, I once again see errors about configuring tetex-base and “the upgrade will be aborted”. I guess it tried that one again, stubborn little thing. Click “OK”, now it says the update is complete but “your system can be in an unusable state”. Oh, great. Now we reboot to see what works; the only error was tetex-base, and nothing particularly vital to the OS relies on TeX, so hopefully it won’t be too bad.
• Rebooting. The console messages that flash past under the Ubuntu logo have changed; they’re a little less technical now.
• I got distracted momentarily, then a sound brought my attention back to the computer. The little “login box is ready” sound. Now I remember why I’d edited my gdm.conf.
• Logging in, GNOME is taking forever to start up. Oh, Beagle is running for the first time in about six months. That’s why everything else is slow.
• Logged in, GNOME looks fine, Beagle’s done indexing. Firefox works, which is nice — I’d severely broken it a while back by performing a manual install to get 1.5 (for Firebug), and then a later upgrade overwrote it with a 1.0.x, which segfaulted every time I tried to launch it. Glad to see that’s cleared up.
• The new default theme has accomplished the impossible: it’s even uglier than before.
• Try an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to see if tetex-base will install cleanly now. Nope.
• Google for the tetex problem, find someone suggesting an apt-get remove —purge of tetex-base and the packages that depend on it (which ended up in a sort of halfway not-installed-but-not-uninstalled state). Try that.
• OK, purged about a half-dozen packages. Now reinstalling them. They go in cleanly! Hooray!
• Man, that new default theme is ugly. Nice to see the included the old one as well, but I’ll stick with good old Gorilla.

Not the smoothest upgrade I’ve ever done, but far from being the worst (nobody will ever manage an upgrade process as horrendous as the one Red Hat used to inflict on its users). And now I’m happily running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, the “Dapper Drake” on my Thinkpad. Yay!