i started a dist-upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 on my work laptop last night. it wasn’t finished when i woke up cause i was prompted to replace a couple of system files i had modified. for the most part the upgrade was uneventful, although i did have to play the nvidia module swap game when the system booted.

nvidia module swap game
1. ctrl+alt+F1 to switch to a different virtual console
2. sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop to kill off X
3. sudo sh ./NVIDIA*.run hopefully you downloaded this before the upgrade. heh #
4. copy a working xorg.conf into place, remove any xorg.conf.failsafe
5. sudo /etc/intit.d/gdm start

i did a quick test to see if hibernate works, nope… i’ll have to poke around to see what i’m missing. no biggie since i haven’t had hibernate work for awhile anyhow. i’m still not too sure about firefox 3 beta 5 though…. i have a ton of extensions that don’t work now. boo.

only 5 more days! i haven’t updated either one of my boxes running 8.04 beta in a few days because i finally have a stable setup for the moment. i’m planning on backing everything up on the laptop and doing a clean 8.04 install after the final comes out. the ubuntu laptop testing team has a pretty comprehensive dell latitude d620 page, and it looks like suspend/hibernate are working again. sweet!

i finally got the t105 the other day and sure enough… i didn’t order the optical drive ($0) when i configured the t105 and dell actually listened and didn’t send one. after trial and error trying to follow the ubuntu live usb how-to, i actually got ubuntu 8.04 to boot off a usb drive.

one of the drawbacks to installing via usb vs cdrom is that you can’t install the alternatives cd and you have to use a ubuntu live cd. i did want to try out the encrypted filesystem support that’s available in the alternatives.

i am glad that i didn’t have to beg/borrow/steal a usb or sata cdrom drive. when going through the how-to make sure that you are using a live cd and also make sure you copy the .disk directory onto your usb drive. if you don’t include the .disk directory you’ll end up at initramfs prompt which won’t do much for you.

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