A step by step report of the upgrade of an Ubuntu laptop.
Today I updated my laptop from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 and this is how it went..
The start
This is usually such a fun task that always brings along some extra work. This isn’t meant to be a guide on how to do things, however, if I come across any issues and find the solutions to them I will post about it in this post.
Let’s start at the beginning. The initialization of the upgrade is:
sudo do_release_upgrade
For me it had to download just over 1 GB of data for the update (it depends on your system, whats on it, how up to date everything is..).
Problems
The error message so far that I’ve seen was that none of the SSL Certs could be installed/unpacked. That’s going to be fun to fix later on *sigh*. The error message was something like: Error adding blablabla cert. This happened with all the Certs it was trying to install, oh goody.
I got the question “Do you want your currently installed configuration replace by the package maintained version”. My answer was: keep the locally installed config file. The info message after that said: successfully installed new version of config file. wtf? I said no! I hope that was a typo on the installers side? I quickly looked it up and it seems to be fine.
Now at the end of it:
The upgrade has completed but there were errors during the upgrade process.
After fixing these (my wireless screwed up somewhere in the middle so it didn’t have Internet connection anymore.)
The laptop is rebooted now and seems to work fine.
Unity
The new version also comes with Unity. The new interface of ubuntu that replaces Gnome. I was one of the people who wasn’t very happy with this choice. Unity just DIDN’T work for me. For a couple of reasons:
- I got error messages with unity (all kinds of things didn’t show up – like half the unity bar)
- The bar was aligned to the left of your screen, my X.org config has 2 screens configured that places the Unity bar on the left side of my extended monitor, its a laptop, so without that screen: no unity bar (I would have to disable the second screen in my config every time if I wanted to use the laptop without a second screen.)
Working with Unity
I have only had unity on my laptop for a short while now. It seems to work a lot better now then in 11.04. The issue with the unity bar showing up on the (not connected) screen on the left: fixed. it now stays on my active laptop screen when the other isn’t connected. So they have fixed that part. Now I have found a issue with the new Unity. Every time my laptop comes out of hibernate the unity bar seems to consist out of noise. To fix this I simply have to have over it with my mouse and it fixes itself. I haven’t used the unity environment long enough to come to a solid conclusion. however I can tell straight away that it works better then the previous version. Now there is also a lot of thins you have to get use to. A full screen application will not have a bar ontop with the normal minimize close and restore. That bar is sort of hidden. its at the top left and only shows up when you hover over it. Time will tell if I like this setup or not.
Time
The whole installation is taking, 2 hours at the moment it seems to be almost done now. It took just over 2 hours (from install to reboot: 2 and a half hours).
Bugs Features
Its always fun to look for bugs after a OS upgrade. This time I didn’t have to look too far: I was looking into how full my hard disk was. Well this is what Ubuntu told me:
Look at the Used Space
So I have 244 Gigs free, ok that is probably correct, but 140.8 Terra Byte in use?!?! Wow that’s one heck of a hard drive in my laptop!
The unity bar (after a wake up from hibernate) is filled with noise. It fixes itself once you will hover over it tho.
So it all went reather smooth this time, no major glitches so far of broken things! yay!
Don’t forget to activate any manually added repositories because they get disabled with an upgrade.
Good luck.