Ubuntu Oneiric upgrade (Thinkpad/Xmonad)
November 24, 2011I upgraded from Ubuntu Natty Narwhal to Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) today. Lots of things broke. In order:
- “Could not calculate the upgrade.” No indication of what the error might be; in my case, the error ended up being old orphan OpenAFS kernel modules (for whom no kernel modules existed). I also took the opportunity to clean up my PPAs.
- “Reading changelogs.”
apt-listchangesisn’t particularly useful, and I don’t know why I installed it. But it’s really painful when it’s taking more time to read changelogs than to install your software. Geoffrey suggestedgdb -p `pgrep apt-listchangesand then forcing it to call exit(0)`, which worked like a charm. Had to do this several times; thought it was infinitely looping. - Icons didn’t work, menus ugly. Go to “System Settings > Appearance” and go set a new theme; in all likelihood your old theme went away. This AskUbuntu question gave a clue.
- Network Manager stopped working. For some inscrutable reason the default NetworkManager config file
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.confhasmanaged=falseforifupdown. Flip back to true. - New window manager, new defaults to dunk you in Unity at least once. Just make sure you pick the right window manager from the little gear icon.
gnome-power-managerwent away. If you fix icons a not-so-useful icon will show up anyway when you loadgnome-settings-daemon.- “Waiting for network configuration.” There were lots of suggestions here. My
/var/runand/var/lockwere borked so I did these instructions, I also hear that you should puntwlan0from/etc/network/interfacesand remove it from/etc/udev/rules.d70-persistent-net.rules. I also commented out the sleeps in/init/failsafe.conffor good measure. - Default GHC is 7.0.3! Blow away your
.cabal(but hold onto.cabal/config) and go reinstall Haskell Platform. Don’t forget to make sure you install profiling libraries, and grabxmonadandxmonad-contrib. Note that previous haskell-platform installs will be rather broken, on account of missing GHC 6 binaries (you can reinstall them, but it looks like they get replaced.) - ACPI stopped knowing about X, so if you have scripts for handling rotation, source
/usr/share/acpi-support/power-funcsand rungetXuserandgetXconsole - DBUS didn’t start. This is due to leftover pid and socket files, see this bug
- Was mysteriously fscking my root drive on every boot. Check your
passparam in/etc/fstab; should be0. - Redshift mysteriously was being reset by xrandr calls; worked around by calling it oneshot immediately after running xrandr.
- Not sure if this was related to the upgrade, but fixed an annoyance where suspend-checking (in case you are coming out of hibernate) was taking a really long time in boot. Set
resumeto right swap in/etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resumeandupdate-initramfs -uwith great prejudice).
Unresolved annoyances: X11 autolaunching in DBUS, the power icon doesn’t always properly show AC information and is too small in stalonetray, xmobar doesn’t support percentage battery and AC coloring simultaneously (I have a patch), a totem built from scratch segfaults.
This is why I have two partitions: one for root, one for user. I keep everything important (programs I’m working on, music, photos, etc.) on the user partition, and install as little as possible on root.
Then when a new distribution comes out, I do a reformat and clean install. This post is why.
welcome to 1995. sad
sent from xp
> Default GHC is 7.0.3!
This is why I always install GHC & cabal-install manually and don’t use distro packages.
i’m new at functional programming (and lambda calculus) so excusse me if my question is silly, or the answer too obvious :D
Why does f (g x (h y (a + b))) translates into f(g(x,h(y,a + b)) and not to f(g,x(h,y(a+b))). I understood the syntax from the article this way: after the ‘$’ symbol we have a parenthesis, where the variables (right “operators” of the ‘$’ symbol) that follow, are the arguments to the left “operator” of the ‘$’ (the function).
where am i wrong? thnks in advance for your answers :D
Just remembered that I meant to comment about this, in the interests of trying to spread good information.
NetworkManager’s managed=true setting in the ifupdown plugin is connected to how it handles /etc/network/interfaces. The assumption in the default install is that if you configured a device in /etc/network/interfaces, you want it managed by ifupdown and not NM, so NM does not try to configure those interfaces itself. This is a reasonable default setting because NM doesn’t yet support the full range of capabilities that /etc/network/interfaces has (e.g. obscure things like interface bonding and bridge interfaces)
The generally correct way to configure a modern Debian/Ubuntu desktop is to remove all non-loopback interfaces from /etc/network/interfaces and let NM take over. This likely would have also kept you from triggering the /etc/init/failsafe.conf Upstart job (which was put in place because Ubuntu server systems were booting fast enough that traditional init scripts were running before networking was up - http://pad.lv/580319)
Also, in defense of Ubuntu, almost all of the problems you describe sound to me like they are connected to external upgrades - the GNOME 3 transition in particular - which means that you likely would have had many of those issues upgrading from any GNOME 2 distribution to its GNOME 3 release.