Diary of tribulations in Upgrading from Ubuntu Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx

May 4.

I have tried many times the upgrade process and I am still not successful.Couple with the fact that there are rotating brown-outs in my home province, anyone's patience patience may wear thin. So I will document what I am doing until I succeed. I tried the all-cd install but the upgrade gave up on some time in the process. The prompt menu buttons are also confusing. You have to press cancel to continue! Hopefully this will be fixed in the near future.

A total of 3621 files (in my case) will be downloaded/updated. The download process may take more than 19 hours.

Not all third party packages will be updated. Here is a list in my specific laptop.


bluetooth
compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
edubuntu-desktop-kde
gettext-kde
glchess
glines
gnect
gnibbles
gnobots2
gnome-pilot
gnome-pilot-conduits
gnotravex
gnotski
gnumeric
gobby
gtali
iagno
italc-client
kdeartwork
kdeartwork-theme-icon
koffice-doc-html
latex-xft-fonts
libcompress-bzip2-perl
libesd-alsa0
libgmime-2.0-2a
libgtkhtml2-0
libpolkit-dbus2
libpolkit-grant2
libsensors3
libtrackerclient0
libusplash0
mesa-utils
netcat-traditional
plasma-widget-googlecalendar
pychecker
pyqt-tools
python-qt-dev
python-qtext
python-sexy
sreadahead
ubuntu-edu-preschool
ubuntu-edu-primary
ubuntu-edu-secondary
ubuntu-edu-tertiary
ubuntu-xsplash-artwork
xaos
xsane
xsane-common
xsplash


The upgrade process consist of several stages:

1. Preparing to upgrade
   
2. Setting new software channels
   
3. Getting new packages
   
4. Installing the upgrades
   
5. Cleaning up
   
6. Restarting the computer.
   

I was always getting stuck at the "Getting new packages stage!" which was the most time consuming so far. I am again redoing a network upgrade. Unfortunately, the upgrade will only be partial.Time estimated to finish the upgrade is 1h 13m. Luckily packages previously downloaded are not erased! So the time estimate is a big improvement over the original 19 hours estimate. The time estimate of 1h 13m is wrong! But the network upgrade was finished just this 5:00 pm. and I am doing editing on this blog. What I learned if I have to do this all over again, is to delete big downloaded files, remove as many programs which can be reinstalled and copy the /home directory to an external store and install the new OS version over the old one. The kernel is now at version 2.6.32-21. Linux toto-laptop 2.6.32-21-generic #32-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 16 08:09:38 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux. How time flies! The kernel have been bumped up again to 2.6.32-22 Linux toto-laptop 2.6.32-22-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 13:28:05 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The new javascript in Firefox does not work well with this blog. The revolvermap widget is not running correctly.It is now running except that once in a while, Firefox asks to whether to stop the script running or close the web page!

There is no update to the 64 bit Flash plugin and thus we cannot play Youtube videos at the moment.

The screen is at a low resolution. The Nvidia driver does not work. May have to reinstall envy.














To be continued...