It was about time

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I've waited till the end of my holidays to upgrade the operating system of various of my computers. I was happily running Ubuntu's Gutsy (7.10) and I'm upgrading to the new Hardy (8.04). Actually it is only one month more for the new version to be available, but this time I did not wanted to upgrade in the middle of the semester.

Contrary to other times, this time I decided to do the upgrade using the embedded upgrade feature of the system updater. My conclusion is that, as usual, it is a risky proposal: My laptop froze when updating the locales (a known bug as I found out later) but killing locale-def allowed the process to come to an end. Lately the system healed itself and everything seems to work as expected now. A minor complain is that now the system takes a few more seconds to wake up from suspend.

On one of my desktops the experience was different but not fault free: No complains or hangs on the locale but an error message about not being able to install linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-19. The install process aborted at the very end. I was left without network connection. The network icon on the desktop showed a red exclamation mark. Running dhclient did not return a valid address but disabling and enabling the network again did work and connection was reestablished. Afterwards a dpkg --configure -a cured the problems and all was good again. After a reboot the system came back to life nicely.

Taking in consideration the time it would take me to restore the different configuration parameters should I have installed a fresh system the upgrade proved a good though a bit rough approach.

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