Since the release date for Ubuntu Dapper was set back 6 weeks, I decided to not wait until June to update my system. Until very recently, I had been running Ubuntu Breezy. You can read about my experiences with installing Ubuntu on my laptop in this article. On Friday, I updated my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to “dapper” rather than “breezy”. I then executed
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
and let the upgrade process begin. Downloading and installing the packages took about two hours.
When I rebooted, everything seemed pretty normal. The bootup sequence looked a little different. It didn’t hang on “setting up network devices”, which it typically does when I’m not physically jacked into an ethernet port. It lost my previously selected GDM login screen. No big deal. I’ll reset that so I don’t have to look at the Ubuntu standard dirt colored one. Logging in worked just fine and I was pleased that at least my desktop background and window borders had survived the upgrade. But NetworkManager couldn’t find my wireless network card. Weird. This still isn’t a huge deal as gtkwifi does a great job managing my wireless connection. I’m sure NetworkManager will just need a little tweeking to get back to its previous splendor.
One thing that I really am disappointed with is that suspend to RAM is now broken. After an ongoing battle with Breezy, I finally got suspend working. In Dapper, neither my custom suspend script nor the builtin suspend functionality work properly. When I come out of suspend, my screen displays purpleish noise. Guess I’ll be hacking on that over the next few days.
Other than those two negatives, everything is running great. Everything feels a little more responsive. And it seems that my system is using a little less RAM than it was before. I blogged a week or so back about my previously non-good experience with beagle search. I am glad to say that so far, beagle has been behaving itself with regard to memory consumption. And I’m pleased with how it works.
When Dapper final is released, I plan on doing a full reinstall. Maybe it’s my experience with Windows that makes me even consider it. Or maybe I think things will run better if I give the installer a chance to find and configure my hardware. Regardless, in June, I’ll have a clean system.
Well, I tried the same and the only thingy I noticed that my NIC moved from eth0 to eth1. No big deal tho, since my config is somehow a bit different: I run Ubuntu under my VMWare ESX server.
The upgrade however ran like charm.
Upgrading to dapper completely trashed my system - I was running with lilo with my root partition on LVM, and after running a dist-upgrade the system crashed badly on bootup. Reinstalling breezy with /boot outside the LVM got the system working again, and from there I upgraded to dapper without too many problems, though ALSA is still broken.
Looks like there's a few things that need fixing before the release.
I tried the same thing, but upgrading to Dapper disabled all of my networking on my IBM T30 Laptop. I did't even have the devices. Alsa also was broken. Don't know what else didn't work, as I re-installed Breezy over the top of it. Thankfully I have my data and home directories in separate partitions, so it was like it didn't even happen.
I am looking forward to the final product, though.
I was doing a fresh install of Dapper server, went back to install LILO (GRUB doesn't work on my IBM workstation), the bar goes to 50% and stops dead. /var/log/syslog final message was apt-install: lilo and nothing else ...