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.