As I mentioned before, I tried to upgrade my laptop from Edgy to Feisty. I had read about upgrades from Dapper to Edgy being a problem, but I also read that upgrading to Feisty shouldn’t be.
I was wrong. After the upgrade, I couldn’t boot into Ubuntu. I would instead see the following:
Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/38ede6ac-6b2f-44d7-a635-deab88ae9381 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!
I had to switch to the earliest kernel I had out of the four or five available before I could boot, and even then it was without a GUI. At least I could edit config files, and with network access, I could check in the changes I made to my project.
After trying a number of solutions I found online, I decided that I didn’t have time for figuring it out and will simply install Feisty over the existing borked-up install. I know Feisty will work on my Dell Precision M90…it’s the same machine that Michael Dell uses Feisty on!
I downloaded a Feisty install ISO, burned it to a CD, and popped it into the laptop. When I ran the install, it asked me about partitions. I told it to leave my /home partition alone. I had backed up the important things on there just in case. It formatted the other partitions (I only had /, swap, and /home), installed, and before I knew it, I had the familiar Ubuntu desktop in front of me.
Why the upgrade didn’t work for me, I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong, and it turned out to be easier to just do a fresh install. The downside to doing so is that I need to redownload any applications and tools I had, such as multimedia codecs, Zim, g++, and autotools. Beryl doesn’t work quite right, but I’m sure I missed something when I set it up. The eye-candy is only useful for showing off at events anyway, so it can wait. B-)
Now that I have it installed, I’m taking it through its paces. Hardware accelerated video is working well, and I haven’t encountered any hardware that isn’t working, so at least there were no regressions there. Wait…Ok, I just checked, and my USB mouse was automatically detected. I had read that people had issues with USB in Feisty, so at least I’m fine. I found that it is mounting my Windows partition, too, which can be useful if I have to access data on that side.
I’m a bit disappointed that the upgrade didn’t work cleanly, and I’m worried about the reports that Feisty is a buggy regression from Edgy. Still, after the install, I’m back to working with my laptop.
5 replies on “Upgrading from Ubuntu Edgy to Ubuntu Feisty”
I hadn’t any problem when upgrades my Clevo D870P (Dapper->Edgy->Feisty).
Jozsef ‘Mash’ Trencsenyi – CEO – Artex Studios, Inc.
http://www.CasualGameStore.com – Mahjong Zodiac – Happy Melodies
Yeah, it’s strange how some people get by without a problem and others do. My situation is apparently not unique, though, so apparently there is a problem that affects a lot of hardware configurations.
Did you ever think the problem may be between the chair and the keyboard? B^)
Yes. I’ve googled, I’ve asked for advice on #ubuntu, I’ve googled some more. I think it would be strange if I somehow messed up the simple action of clicking on the Upgrade to Feisty button and expecting it to just work.
Even if it didn’t just work, I was more than willing to fix whatever went wrong. Unfortunately, reinstalling from scratch seemed the easiest and least error-prone way. Since so many other people report similar problems, I think it is safe to assume that the problem does not lie with me.
As for Beryl not working, I’m pretty sure that I forgot something. I found a page describing how to set it up in Feisty, but I bet it was either missing something or outdated. I did remember to change my bitdepth in xorg.conf from 16 to 24, something that I didn’t know the first time I installed Ubuntu and Beryl on this system. Until I decided to try that change last time, I was just getting green, corrupted-looking windows. B-)
Ahem. Ok, the problem with Beryl was me. B-\
I know that the first thing I checked was that xorg.conf was using 24 instead of 16. Somehow, I must not have actually applied those changes. Maybe I didn’t run sudo when editing and then completely forgot about making the change after I was told that it was a read-only file?
In any case, Beryl works again. Yay, wobbly windows!
And now I can forget about it, only to use it when I want to show off. B-)