Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” upgrade notes


As experienced computer users know, the fresh-released versions of products are typically not very stable and reliable. It takes a few months (Typically until the x.1 version is release) for the product to really stabilize and become production-ready. This also seems to be true for Free and Open-Source software, though the maturing rate seems to be faster.

Knowing that, I typically wait a couple of months after an Ubuntu release before I take the time to upgrade. When it comes to Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, a further reason not to upgrade was provided by the fact that up until now it didn’t include a stable version of Firefox.

I finally decided to take the time and upgrade the Ubuntu version on my personal home computer yesterday. The upgrade didn’t went as smoothly as I hoped it would. Most of the issues can be blamed on the manual tweaks I’ve made to my system. Not all, however.

Below is a list of the issues I’ve encountered during and after the upgrade, and the solutions I came up with (when applicable).

Configuration file replacement questions

This had been a problem plaguing Debian and Ubuntu installations ever since apt acquired the ability to perform distribution upgrade. It has to do with the problem that arises when a package seeks to install a new version of a configuration file that was modified by the sysadmin. To resolve the issue the installation process is stopped and a question is presented to the sysadmin. This is annoying for several reasons:

Often the sysadmin starts the upgrade...

Read more...