Upgrading ubuntu…

February 21, 2009

Today, I upgraded my parents’ computer. From ubuntu 8.04 to ubuntu 8.10. Summary : ouch.

No more keyboard in X. No more mouse in X. No more soundcard.

What happened to X? Eh, it commented the keyboard and mouse sections in xorg.conf — because now it’s magically hal-detected, so those are useless now. So useless uncommenting makes things work again.

It works, but a shiny button proposes to install nvidia drivers. Shiny, click! Let’s restart X. Uh… doesn’t start. But we get a nice dialog asking what to do. One of the choices is to reconfigure. Let’s do that. No keyboard nor mouse — again!!!???!!! Of course, it just made a configuration file without the needed sections. A dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg later, the situation is sane again.

Now, what about sound? lsmod | grep snd makes it clear there are no sound modules loaded. After a quick updatedb, I check where the .ko are… none for the running kernel. A google later, I learn that I need a driver package (linux-ubuntu-drivers or something like this, but with the kernel version in the name), and synaptic says it doesn’t have one for the running kernel version. Gasp!

Let’s install a newer kernel, with all we need. Reboot (I hate rebooting… that’s so… stupid). Sound is back.

The fear I have is that it will now overwrite xorg.conf regularly, and hence stop working regularly. I need to find out how to make that box just work!!!

Edit: it turns out the keyboard&mouse issues were caused by the start of X before hal… reversing their initialization order makes things work : it won’t stop working behind my back (and worse, while I’m not there to fix back).

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