[Discuss] Notes on kubuntu dist-upgrade to dapper from breezy

[Alan W. Irwin]

One of my systems is very difficult to install from scratch with Ubuntu
because of a non-bootable scsi drive and an iffy floppy drive.  However, a
while back I finally got the floppy to work well enough so that I got Ubuntu
breezy installed (see
http://vlug.org/pipermail/discuss/2006-March/020747.html).  Now I want to
change that system to dapper, but I want to avoid the difficulties of doing
it from scratch so this time I used the "apt-get dist-upgrade" method.

I felt that enough time had gone by since dapper was released that (a) the
bandwidth required by apt-get would no longer be saturated, (b) a number of
dapper reviews would be available (so far I have only seen one negative
review with a large number of positive reviews), and (c) any showstopper
problems would have published work-arounds.  Thus, I have tried upgrading
from breezy to dapper today using the familiar (to me) command-line method.

Here are my notes if anybody else wants to try this.

(1) Read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DapperUpgrades and links published
there.

(2) Complete backup of my /home partition.  In an ideal world this step
should not be necessary, but it does give peace of mind in case some screwup
of the dist-upgrade kills /home.

(3) apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

This is a pain (since I have removed a number of unused packages that this
package depends on), but it is recommended so I did it.  The result was all
these unused packages were re-installed again. Later, after the dist-upgrade
to dapper I plan to remove the same unwanted packages (kdm, etc.) again.  I
feel this procedure is essentially a workaround for Ubuntu dependency bugs,
and I strongly hope it will be not necessary for future releases. Also,
note, there are apparently dependency bugs in the docbook-utils package, but
I didn't have that installed so I didn't have to do the recommended
workaround (which was to remove docbook-utils before dist-upgrading).

(2) edit /etc/sources.list (breezy ==> dapper).  The recommendation is to
comment out all non-standard repositories, but I don't use such repositories
so this recommendation was irrelevant to me.

(3) apt-get update

(4) apt-get dist-upgrade

I have a fully loaded system (complete development environment and lots of
packages installed from universe).  Thus, this last step required 650MB to
be downloaded from the apt-get server which took roughly an hour at 200KB/s.
Installing all the new packages took an additional 1.5 hours after that
(which was particularly slow because this is a 600MHz system).  During the
whole process the only questions I had to answer concerned updating
configuration files that I had already changed myself. (/etc/default/cdrecord,
/etc/ntp.conf).

(5) There were some problems during the "apt-get dist-upgrade".
The summary was

Errors were encountered while processing:
  tetex-base
  tetex-bin
  tetex-extra
  xmltex
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Also, tidy could not be upgraded for some reason.  The solution for these
problems was to

apt-get --purge remove tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra xmltex tidy

I assume this is some dependency issue with the old version, and I will
install the new versions again at some point.

(6) I really dislike all display managers.  The "startx" method works almost
as conveniently, and the problem with display managers is the start of X is
automated which can lead you into some nasty trouble (with potential
destruction of your monitor) if your X configuration is inconsistent with
your monitor.

Thus, I used

apt-get --purge remove kdm

so that the startx method would work.  Note, there is a lot of wrong google
information stating the startx method does not work with Ubuntu, but all you
have to do is remove kdm if you have installed kde-desktop. (I presume for
gnome-desktop, you would probably have to remove gdm and/or xdm to get the
startx method working.)

(7) At this point, the recommended reboot worked without bringing up the
display manager. On the console, a repeat of the "apt-get dist-upgrade"
command showed there were no obvious configuration or install problems.
However, there were two problems using the system.

(i) Routing for my LAN did not work.  All LAN traffic was fine, I could
access the internet from my Ubuntu dapper box, but any attempt to access the
internet from my other box did not work.

The problem turned out to be that /etc/init.d/networking has lost some
functionality (the ability to set ip_forward, spoofprotect, and syncookies
for the kernel).  /etc/init.d/procps.sh has this functionality instead which
is now controlled by uncommenting certain lines in /etc/sysctl.conf.

(ii) The X server did not work.  The error message was the following:

dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libGLcore.so: undefined symbol:
__glXLastContext

A number of others have encountered this problem with Ubuntu and also
Debian unstable.  The solution
(indicated on a Debian bug discussion of this problem) is to edit
/etc/X11/xorg.conf and get rid of the line

Load    "GLcore"

Apparently explicitly loading that module from xorg.conf is no longer
allowed, and instead it has to be indirectly loaded from other modules (if
required).

Once the GLcore problem was taken care of, the startx method worked.  I was
also careful to rename .kde and .kderc in my home directory so that I
got a fresh default configuration of the new version of KDE.

The new version of KDE came up without problems, and tomorrow I expect it
will take me the usual half hour to configure it just the way I like it
using the kcontrol GUI.

Thus, "so far so good" with my dapper dist-upgrade.  From the above
mini-adventures, I would recommend a fresh install for newbies rather than
using the dist-upgrade method.  Fresh installs are also generally
recommended for experts as well since they tend to produce cleaner installs
(extraneous files and packages guaranteed not to be left hanging about) than
the dist-upgrade method.  However, if you know what you are doing, the
dist-upgrade does work, and it is recommended if you expect that the fresh
install might be difficult (as for this particular box).

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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