Last night I decided on a whim to upgrade to the latest RC (release candidate) of Ubuntu called Hardy Heron (8.x). It’s due to officially be released in a few days so I figured it should be fairly stable and I thought I’d beat the rush and upgrade now. Usually I do these sort of things with little planning and last night was no exception!
- No backup (rsync is sooo easy but really, what could go wrong?)
- Started the upgrade right about the time a huge thunderstorm was overhead (computers love lightening!)
- Forgot once again to backup my xorg.conf file (just in case)
The upgrade took about an hour. Soon it rebooted my system and of course my monitors were all a mess. Seems the NVidia drivers either didn’t get upgrade or got hosed. Sigh. Then I go to hit the Ubuntu forums (a great resource) and they are down for maintenance or something. Ooops.
But I did find one post on the web that suggested trying Envy to load the latest NVidia drivers. I did that and things still weren’t right so I loaded up the package manager, uninstalled EVERYTHING NVidia related and tried Envy again. This time I got nvidia-settings to run and from there it was just a simple matter of setting things up again and tweaking my xorg.conf file. The only other thing that didn’t work was my sound for some reason but a quick search on the web and I found a few suggestions and after fiddling a bit I got it working as well.
I didn’t really have time afterwards to dig around and find out what’s new with the latest release but will hopefully have time to do that tonight after the TACFUG meeting! Overall I’ve been very happy with Ubuntu but I do wish they could spend some time fixing the monitor setup issues. That has been an issue during the last 2-3 upgrades.
Hmm.. your experience doesn’t sound too good. I’ve been holding off for Thursday, as if I had downloaded the RC, I would have ended up re-downloading the final release.
Gavin, from the perspective of a Ubuntu newbie – no it wasn’t too good. Luckily I have a bit of experience so I didn’t panic and was able to fix things rather quickly. I don’t think I have an abnormal system either. I have a rather old Nvidia 7600 and two monitors.
I updated at the Alpha6 level, and it’s been (relatively) smooth sailing.
I like updating by downloading the Alternate CD via bittorrent, and then using that to update, saved me HEAPS of time, and I don’t have to download over regular channels as well.
I didn’t have your nVidia problems tho’.. weird that!
I’ve installed the final version of Hardy and everything works perfectly :)
You gotta love Ubuntu !