Thursday, April 2, 2009

Upgraded to Jaunty on laptop.

On a whim I decided to upgrade my laptop from Kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 Beta. I don't do alpha any more as I kind of like things to work the vast majority of the time. On my two desktops I upgrade the day before a release to beat the next days surge on the servers that make downloading the updates take a long time.
I kind of use my laptop as a test machine. It runs my only go at Kubuntu, and I even have KDE4.2, which isn't officially supported on 8.10, and does have some problems. So being a sort of test machine I thought I would go ahead and try it.
Kubuntu does not use update-manager, so the usual update-manager -d doesn't work. I thought sudo apt-get --dist-upgrade would work, but it did nothing. Googling around updating to Jaunty with Kubuntu brought up the apt-get solution, which wasn't working. I asked on the #ubuntu-us-fl irc channel, and after a while mhall119 discovered that the correct command was update-notifier-kde -d.
I was trying to do this remotely using X over ssh and X kept failing. When I got home I ran update-notifier and it got all the packages, updated, and when I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 was installed.
Using the instructions at http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesystem_to_ext4 I updated my file system to ext4. Because you can't change the file system if it is mounted, I had to download the latest ISO for Jaunty Beta and boot from it. Once there I ran:
sudo tune2fs -j /dev/sda1
sudo tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda1
sudo e2fsck -fD /dev/sda1

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/jaunty/beta says that after that you need to run grub-install, but that didn't do anything. Instead I ran:
sudo grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
quit

After a reboot I was running Jaunty with the ext4 file system. The first boot was not fast at all, but every boot after that has been under 30 seconds. 3D desktop now works, which is a big bonus. A few background apps crash after bootup, and I send the apport to Launchpad. Hopefully by the time Jaunty goes to release all of this crashing of background apps will be fixed.

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