I figured that I’d upgrade my work PC to Ubuntu Dapper this morning. In retrospect, considering that my heating and hot water pump died this morning, and dropped water all over my floor, I really shouldn’t have done this upgrade.
Things that broke:
- GUI
- KDE
- Sound
- Networking
- Who knows what else
The GUI required a full reinstall of the ATI proprietary driver, and the removal of xcompmgr from my .xinitrc. However, by blanking .xinitrc, I managed to cause X to fall over in a big heap! It looks like an empty, but present, .xinitrc causes X to try to exec nothing, and it just exits. Not even a ‘.xinitrc specified nothing to execute’! *twitch*
apt-get dist-upgrade decided to remove all of my KDE packages. I don’t know why, it just did. Had to reinstall KDE by hand. Installing KDE didn’t install KDM (GUI login manager), but KDM got removed when KDE got removed. Moreover, KDE’s bottom (for me) panel showed up blank. All my configuration was gone, and I have to re-create it. *twitch* *twitch*
apt-get dist-upgrade didn’t upgrade the kernel, and this broke ALSA (sound) in mysterious ways. The driver for the sound card refused to load (it turns out), which meant everything sound related didn’t work. A quick browse of the Ubuntu Forums indicated that people had experienced all sorts of weird issues with the Dapper upgrade and sound, and I finally found mention of ‘upgrade the kernel, it should be 2.6.15′. *twitch* *twitch* *twitch*
Next up, after installing the kernel and rebooting, I find that I have no network connectivity. dmesg indicates that tg3 has found eth0, but by the time the OS is up and running, ip addr, ifconfig and pals all tell me that there is no such hardware device as eth0. It’s now eth1! *TWITCH*
I’m afraid to see what else doesn’t work now.