Ubuntu 13.04

So far I’ve upgraded two machines. I like the new Ubuntu (though it looks and feels like 12.10 :)) but the upgrade was not as smooth as before.

First, on my workplace machine the upgrade process stopped at 30% and the machine simply froze down. I could move the mouse but nothing else worked. Even the clock in the top right corner stopped. I gave it a try, restarted the machine and to my greatest surprise it came back alive and I even had a graphical interface. Wow! With my good_shape_safe.sh script (it’s the second one) I could continue the upgrade process and it finished in order. After a reboot I had a fully functional Ubuntu 13.04.

Second, my home desktop was upgraded without any freeze :) I brought home the update packages and thus the upgrade process finished in an hour. However, after reboot the X started in low resolution. When I launched “nvidia-settings“, it said that my Nvidia card was not enabled and I should re-generate the xorg.conf file. It told me how to do that so I copied/pasted that line to a terminal. After that I reinstalled the nvidia packages:

sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-settings

After restarting the X (“sudo service lightdm restart“) the resolution was fine.

However, the torture was not over yet. The graphical interface (Unity) got messed up: the launcher didn’t appear; the Super key (Windows button) didn’t bring up the Dash; the top panel was covered by a Gnome2-ish panel, etc. Fortunately, I found a script that could reset my Unity: https://github.com/phanimahesh/unity-revamp. It worked perfectly and my Unity became usable again. With “ubuntu-tweak” I could fine-tune my new Ubuntu and now it looks like my 12.10 :)

Links

• I read about the unity-reset script here
• you can install ubuntu-tweak easily with my jabbatron installer script

Update (20130428)
This morning my Ubuntu got f* up completely. I was at the point that I reinstall the whole s* from scratch. Strangely, after some restarts it started to work OK. So, here is what happened.

First, after restart I got a blank screen. No X, nothing. I couldn’t even switch to console with Ctrl+Alt+F1. After a reset I got the graphical interface. But after a restart no X again. It was alternating… I edited the file “/etc/default/grub” and changed this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash"

Now at least I could follow the bootup sequence and noticed that the boot stopped after mounting the swap partition. Following this post I could fix the swap partition. I am not 100% sure that it was the problem since I also installed a newer version of the nvidia driver.

Fixing the swap partition:

# run "sudo gparted" and figure out the partition of the swap
# for me it was /dev/sda2
sudo swapoff /dev/sda2
sudo mkswap /dev/sda2
sudo swapon /dev/sda2
sudo update-initramfs -u

Update the nvidia driver:

# previous version: 304.88
sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-*
sudo apt-get install nvidia-313 nvidia-settings-313

Now the blank screen problem was solved. However, I couldn’t stop the machine. It displayed “* Will now restart” but nothing happened. Again, I had to poke the “/etc/default/grub” file:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="reboot=b"

More info here. Now it seems OK. Damn, if I had known that I’d have so many problems, I wouldn’t have upgraded to 13.04…

Appendix
My “/etc/default/grub” file looks like this:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
#GRUB_DEFAULT="Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)"
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=7
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="reboot=b"

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

When you edit this config file, run the following command:

sudo update-grub2

Update (20130503)
My upgraded Ubuntu 13.04 continued to behave strangely. I got fed up with that and today I reinstalled it from scratch. Now it works correctly. Something must have happened to it during the upgrade…

Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS

I just figured out that you can upgrade an Ubuntu LTS to the next Ubuntu LTS release. This means that 8.04 can be upgraded directly to 10.04 for instance. There is no need to upgrade to 8.10, etc.

We have an old machine and I put Ubuntu 8.04 on it a long time ago. Since it reached its end of life in May 2011, I was glad to see that I could upgrade to 10.04 easily.

Troubleshooting
At the very end of the upgrade process I had a little problem: the updating stopped and a warning message notified me that the update process was not completed. It has already happened to me some times. At this point I opened a terminal and executed the good_shape_safe.sh script (use the *_safe.sh version). This script could correct the setup process and put my Ubuntu in a consistent state.