[vox-tech] Ubuntu 10.04 LTS upgrade woes

[Brian Lavender]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 10:55:40PM -0800, Alex Mandel wrote:
> On 01/16/2011 10:40 PM, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> > 
> > Long story shoty. I have a Kubuntu 9.04 install. Finally told it to upgrade,
> > and it brought itself up to 9.10, and then I initiated an upgrade to 10.04.
> > It started reporting errors, with the only options being "Report Bug" (which
> > did nothing) and "Close" (dismiss error).
> > 
> > It got through all of the pkgs in the "Upgrade" step (next step being
> > "Cleanup") and complained that some stuff wasn't installed, and it would
> > issue a "dpkg-reconfigure -a" or somesuch to fix itself.  Dimissed that
> > window, then the main window hung (blank).
> > 
> > It's late, and it looked in a bad state, so I zapped it and rebooted.
> > Now I'm landing im a shell upon reboot with a complaint about
> > "mountall" not taking some argument or another.
> > 
> > So... anybody got a 10.10 disc I can borrow?  I'd like to boot into LiveCD
> > mode, re-copy my home directory over to my NAS, and then wipe & reinstall.
> > I'd love to get back up and running before Tuesday.  Anyone got one I can
> > grab in the morning? ;)
> > 
> > This is the worst upgrade disaster I've witnessed.  Stupid Ubuntu. :(
> > 
> I can burn one for you in the morning. This is one reason why I do
> separate partitions for / and /home.

The separate /home is definitely a good idea. My idea is to just
use a whole brand new disk and save the old one.

I recently just bought a separate hard drive for 70 bucks, stuck it
in my machine and then copied all my data from home back onto my newly
installed system.  This way, if I had something installed in /usr/local
or the newly installed programs don't work, I can stick the old disk
back in, and I am good to go. For instance, I am having problem with
autoconf and the older version of nProbe that worked with my old system.

Plus, I sometimes end up doing wierd things to my system where it
doesn't work such as the "effects" for wobbly windows. I use this
command to tar up those "dot" directories (Thanks to Chuck on lug-nuts).

tar cf dotfiles.tar .[!.]* || exit 2

On the new system, I put the original "dot" directories in a separate
area and restore them as I need them.

brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."
--Kasey Kasem