Upgrade to Hardy

Well, I bit down on the bullet today to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu: 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron!

The process wasn’t a smooth as I hoped, but not as bad as I feared. Even though I tried to be prepared and pay attention, there were a few problems.

Avoiding the rush

I understood that the servers would be pretty busy, so I wanted to avoid online updating. I figured I could torrent the CD image, burn it, and then upgrade from there.

Turns out you can only do that with the alternate install or DVD images? So, basically I wasted all the time for the torrent to come it, about an hour of trying to figure out why the CD wasn’t showing up right in the Software Sources, and then I ended up having to wait about 3 hours for the online update process anyway.

Not really Ubuntu’s fault I guess, but still not the note I wanted to get started on.

Do You Want to Keep This? I don’t know — Do I?

There were a few points in the upgrade process where the program informed me I had made changes to a file and I was basically presented with a diff and the option to Keep my changes or go with the new version.

It asked me about the menu.lst, which I told it to use the new version. Everything else, I said keep my changes. I’m not sure if that was a mistake, but it caused some problems.

No Network!? That’s going to make things hard…

As I mentioned in this post about my “Disappearing LAN“, I had removed the default kernel driver for my motherboard Ethernet adapter, and installed the latest driver from Realtek instead.

Result after upgrade? No LAN. That’s not where you want to be; fortunately, I have a laptop and found some help in #ubuntu.

In this case, the temporary fix was easy enough, just load the kernel driver:

sudo modprobe r8169


This was enough to get the network up! I downloaded the new drivers from Realtek (they had been updated since last time), but this time I could NOT compile them … I haven’t figured out why yet.

However, I just removed r8169 from /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and blacklist.network and it loads. Perhaps it will work? I’ll keep it like this for now.

I can’t see a thing

As I expected, the NVIDIA drivers did not work — this is usual after any kernel change — but the upgrade does not include the kernel headers, which are necessary to re-compile the drivers. And, of course without the network I couldn’t get the headers, and without the video drivers I had to work out of a terminal.

In any case, I grabbed the headers and re-installed the drivers. This time, though, I ran back into that same problem where Ubuntu doesn’t seem to want to use the nvidia drivers, instead it defaults to vesa. However, following the instructions at the Ubuntu Community NvidiaManual page got me where I needed to be!

I had to twiddle a bit with nvidia-settings to get things back to how I had them before, but that was minor. (At first, the resolutions were 640×480 even though the drivers were up — very strange.)

Theme

Then I had a strange problem with the theme not applying to windows. I found a thread on the Ubuntu forums that sounds exactly like what I was going through – however, at least as of the time of this writing, there is no solution.

This is the error I get:

/usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:211: Invalid symbolic color 'selected_bg_color'
/usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:211: error: invalid identifier `selected_bg_color', expected valid identifier


I worked around this by finding a theme (Clearlooks) that did not raise the error. Not a great solution, but I’m trying to get everything working at least right now.