Ubuntu upgrades. wow!

January 8, 2009 - Reading time: 2 minutes

I have a couple of machines running Ubuntu. More and more lately.

One machine at home was running Ubuntu 7.04 and mythtv. I was loath to change it because it was working and I hate having to type "ssh" when I'm watching tv.

But, I finally did it over the holidays. First I upgraded to 7.10, which was a pain. 7.04 is not longer supported and I have to hack the apt config file to point to the archives. But this broke the upgrade. So I ended up starting with a archive pointing apt config and then switching it in the middle of the upgrade to point to the normal repository. A bit hair raising but it worked.

Once at 7.10 I could cleanly upgrade to 8.04 and then to 8.10. I did it all via ssh and and it worked with very few problems. My hat is off to the Ununtu guys.

Getting X to work consistantly with my Nvidia display card was no so easy. With some releases there is support from Ubuntu. But not 8.10. For that I had to go back to using the linux install script from NVidia, which does all sorts of fun things under the covers.

But now I have mythtv back, and I'm running 8.10 and all is well with the world.

That went so well I upgrade a machine at work and it too did the right thing. Very nice.

Sadly I'm about to wave goodbye to RedHat. I with I didn't have to,but they don't seem to be providing the same level of coolness that Ubuntu us. The "apt-get" system is just too nice. I never want to see another rpm again.

Virtually everything I wanted was available from apt-get. Amazing. And easy!

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