Gutsy dist-upgrade

I waited a few weeks before upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon because I've always had trouble with Ubuntu dist-upgrades and I wanted to get past some milestones first (Timmy's birthday, for one) before trying to upgrade and possibly ending up with a broken system that I'd have to spend a day or more fixing.

I've never had success with any Ubuntu online distro upgrade, and I've been trying it since Dapper. Twice I've broken my system sufficiently badly that I had to reinstall from CD (I could probably have fixed it, but I'm not all that familiar with dpkg or grub, and both times I had problem with one or both of those subsystems).

I'm pretty sure that those failed online upgrades were my fault. I install packages from multiverse, universe and some lesser known repositories. I also will sometimes monkey with files that the packages require to exist or be in one or another format. In any case, I'd done some similar monkeying with Feisty, so I wasn't confident that the distro upgrade would work flawlessly.

I finally made the plunge last night after a marathon of converting images (renaming more logically/usefully, at my wife's request), videos (converting in kino to divx so that they're 1/4 to 1/6 original size), and backing up everything (rdiff-backup to my external hard drive, and the images and videos to my wife's external hard drive and laptop, because losing timmmy's pictures and videos is inconceivable).

As usual, I didn't get a flawless upgrade. Fortunately, however, this time there was just one major problem. Initially there was a weird minor issue when the distro upgrade seemed stuck. I did an strace on the process and noticed that it seemed to be in a loop working on the linux kernel image. So I killed that and after a

dpkg --configure -a

restarted the distro upgrade. It worked better after that, asking me what to do about config files that I'd manually modified. For some questions I kept my changes (always after viewing a diff of the config files), others I allowed the distro to replace my changes.

Again, though, the distro upgrade failed. This time on an openoffice.org package that involved mobile devices (not sure how I got that installed, probably with the openoffice.org evolution integration package). That was bad enough that I had to dpkg --configure -a again, and then remove all the openoffice.org packages so that the upgrade could continue.

I had to go to bed after some pressure from my wife, and then a 30 minute brownout almost broke the install. After more pressure from my wife (including her turning off and unplugging my laptop :-), I finally went to bed and restarted the distro upgrade in the morning. Fortunately, everything worked fine after that and I've got a usable Gutsy system now.

There is one problem though. Firefox 2.0.0.8 (even with all add-ons removed) crashes randomly on some sites, and consistently (as in EVERY SINGLE TIME) on blogger. Which is why I'm posting this using epiphany. I was going to use Opera, but I decided to try the different browsers available with Ubuntu first before switching to Opera. Galeon breaks in the same way Firefox does. Clearly it uses the same buggy library. Fortunately, epiphany works well. I think I'll switch to epiphany until Firefox is fixed. I'm sure going to miss adblock though, and noscript, etc.

I use gnomad2 (since we've got a creative nomad zen mp3 player which we use mainly to play lullabies for Timmy to sleep to), and that works perfectly. I'm hoping that kino and ffmpeg work a bit better in Gutsy. In Feisty, most files would convert to divx medium quality. But some files would produce zero length .avi files. Those I'd have to reconvert to the next higher quality level just so that it'd be divx (and still half the size of the original avi file). I'll have to test kino with ffmpeg again on those files :-).

Upgrade: I broke down and googled for the firefox problem (first I ran firefox in a terminal so I could see the error message when it died).

It's a bug with libhunspell. The workaround is to disable spell checking in firefox. Turn off Edit|Preferences|Advanced|Check my spelling as I type..

Cool. I was liking epiphany, but some things were irritating (no multiple home pages, no multiple rows of tabs, although I really liked how fast it was, but no NoScript or AdBlock).