Kubuntu upgrade from 12.04 to 13.04

Despite Kubuntu 12.04 being a LTS release, and after some weeks upgrading to 13.04 on my personal desktop computer, I decided to do the same on my Work Laptop.

Things didn’t ran as expected…

First the upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10 deleted a bunch of packages, by my command 😦 and I ended up with no graphical display… A quick look at Xorg.0.log file showed me that my Xorger’s driver for my Intel graphic card was gone.

Anyway, I’ve installed the xservers-xorg-video-intel package and proceeded to upgrade to 13.04.

At the end despite having a graphical desktop, after login on KDE, a qdbus error appeared… qdbus package was missing… (apt-get install qdbus).

Also on 12.04 the transition from the login greeter to the desktop is silky smooth (it is on my desktop), on my laptop it blanks showing a black screen with a mouse cursor, but the desktop shows up abruptly. I don’t have now the KDE logon progress icons…

And finally, DNS settings from my DHCP servers didn’t worked, I had to manually add the dns servers IP to resolv.conf…  This issue was also a missing package, namely dnsmaq. After adding up the nameserver 127.0.0.1 to my /etc/resolv.conf file, everything is up….

Let’s see what is waiting again in the dark…

Kubuntu 10.10 upgrade to Kubuntu 11.04

After a two months of waiting that the dust settled on the release of the new 11.04 Kubuntu version, I’ve finally upgraded my home computer.

And now, for the first time, I’m amazed that it went flawless… Even with some backports enabled, namely Kubuntu backports, the upgrade went without any issue what so ever.

After reboot, and because I’m using the proprietary fglrx driver, I ended up on the console, no graphic environment, but enabling the X-Team PPA, doing an update and enabling the fglrx driver, I had again all things working fine.

So this time there are no tricks on this upgrade, and my I’ve able to upgrade since 8.10 till now successfully. All I have left to upgrade is the legacy GRUB 1 bootloader.

Now, my work laptop HP Compaq nx9420 is about be retired and replaced by a new ASUS N73SV laptop. On the HP I also was able to successfully upgrade to Kubuntu 10.10, but on the new laptop I’m thinking on a rolling release distro, Arch Linux to be exact. Here are my thoughts why: https://primalcortex.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/arch-linux-tes…r-from-kubuntu/

Kubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 upgrade

Since Kubuntu 8.04 that I’ve chosen to upgrade my installation instead of re-installing everything by scratch. One of the main reason is that I was to lazy to create a separated /home partition, and I really don’t want also to re-install all applications from scratch.

Most of the people that choose the upgrade path hit some issues that do not happen when doing a fresh install, and, yes, I hit some problems. Some problems are Kubuntu related and do not happen when using Ubuntu…

So the story:

Because my home machine has an ATI 4870 and I’m using the ATI proprietary driver, I wanted to make sure that my driver was up to date because Kubuntu 10.10 uses the latest Xorg…

So while still using 10.04 and the latest kernel available, I downloaded ATI driver 10.12 and it failed to install with the latest kernel.

This was problem number one: To cut a long story short the solution for this issue is here: https://primalcortex.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/kubuntu-install-ati-drivers

Anyway, for upgrading I went to Adept Installer, and on Sources->Edit Software Sources -> Updates changed the Release Upgrade to Normal Releases.

Sure enough, the 10.10 upgrade was offered.

Phase one: Upgrade stopped with error on log “Could not calculate upgrade-Can’t mark ‘kubuntu-desktop’ for upgrade“. It took me a while to find out that this was some meta package leftover from previous upgrades/installs that was not needed. So: apt-get remove kubuntu-desktop and this was the only package removed.

Phase two: Upgrade now stops with another weird error: could not install the upgrades – Couldn’t configure pre-depend x11-common for x11-xkb-utils, probably a dependency cycle

This took some time to solve and the solution is here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/x11-xkb-utils/+bug/639933

Mainly is to do the following as root:

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/x/xorg/x11-common_7.5+6ubuntu3_all.deb
dpkg -i x11-common_7.5+6ubuntu3_all.deb

After this the upgrade ran without any problem.

At the end rebooted and: Despite of running Kubuntu the splash screen was of Ubuntu 10.10… Not nice.This is probably because I was running the command line upgrade tool do-release-upgrade? Not sure. Not important for now…

Boot proceed to fail completely into the text boot login… Oh boy… No graphical desktop no kde desktop no nothing. So I’ve logged in text mode with my credentials and “sudoed” to root (sudo bash)

Ok. Looking at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file shows that the proprietary fglrx.ko module was not found. Ok, fair enough: The reason was that during the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 the kernel version changed, and the previous configuration was lost.

So I edit the /etc/apt/sources.lst and enabled all Kubuntu PPA’s and ubuntu-x-swat PPA. These where disabled during the upgrade, so I need now to enable them to get the latest KDE (4.5.4 at this date) and the ATI proprietary driver. The usual commands apt-get update, and apt-get upgrade and the new KDE and fglrx drivers is downloaded and installed.

Reboot

Still text mode… Xorg.0.log still complains that the fglrx driver is not installed…

Now what? I’ve installed the proprietary driver with jockey-kde which is a graphical utility, but now I don’t have no graphical environment…

The text only tool is jockey-text and running with the -l (that’s an l not an i) reports that the xorg:fglrx driver is DISABLED… ok, So:

jockey-text -e xorg:fglrx

enables the driver and then rebooting it solves the issue. Now I have a graphical KDE environment…

So what’s was broken during the upgrade?

hplip 3.10.2  – doesn’t work anymore: Can’t detect my c309g-m printer. Upgrading to hplip 3.10.9 solves the issue.

Akonadi Google plugins to synchronize calendar and contacts looks like it’s broken. I can’t see my Gcal events… Not sure if it’s related to the upgrade…

What’s new:

I’ve installed bluedevil to replace the old bluetooth software.

Boot times are faster

Fonts look much better.

Upgraded to Digikam 1.7

 

The final problem: At boot instead of having the Kubuntu splash screen, I have the Ubuntu pink/violet one… So I went to synaptic and removed the package plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo e plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text leaving only the Kubuntu related ones.

Phase 1: Upgrade my work computer from Kubuntu 9.04 to 9.10

Today at work I had a lot of documentation to read, so, why wait, lets upgrade my Kubuntu 9.04 running on an HP nx9420 portable computer to the latest Karmic Koala release, while I slip through documentation…

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 on this computer was a bit of a pain, mainly because I was already running KDE 4, so at the end of the upgrade I was without any graphic environment installed and working… but everything was solved by accessing the console and installing manually KDE 4 again.

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 I was also bitten by the drop of support of ATI for this HP graphic card an X1600, so I ended up with the open source drivers, and some problems that I didn’t had with ATI proprietary drivers: screen corruption on refresh of some application areas (pretty annoying), crash on street view on google earth, vmware console missing buttons, to name a few. At the begining I had also a lot of crashes related to screen activity, but upgrading to the tormod ATI driver, solved most of the crashs, but other issues still remained.

So, I was expecting some problems upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 this time, but the upgrade mostly went well, except one minor detail: menu.lst for grub was not updated with the latest kernel, so after booting up, and logging in I ended up with a garbage full screen and an unusable desktop… going to a session console and back again restored the desktop screen but everything was too slow. So I corrected the Grub configuration to use the correct kernel, and things started much better:

– Boot time: way faster on 9.10 than on 9.04

– Screen appearance and fonts seem more streamlined and better. I think my screen real estate is now better used.

The bad news: My company provided vmware workstation stopped working on kernel 2.6.31… The vmware modules are unable to compile, so I’ll have to download version 6.5.3 and see how it goes. (Edit: using VMware Workstation 6.5.3, does work)

I’ll have to do further tests so see if at least the ati driver issues are better, and also to see if I don’t have any new issues.

Anyway, one of the things that happened is that 9.10 uses Firefox 3.5, and I was using 3.0… Some plugins that I had on 3.0 stopped working on 3.5, namely switchproxy tool and fxinfo… The good news is that now I can use Mozilla Weave… yeay!

On my home computer, I’ve also upgraded firefox, but due to the issue with vmware, I’ll see if I can fix it before upgrading this one… also I have an ATI 4870, so I’ll wait a bit more before jumping…