A weekend of upgrades…
So the weather sucked and I didn’t feel like playing any online games today. I decided to do some updates, upgrades, and play around for a bit.
The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks). I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house. No problems with the basic updates. Everything went as planned.
The next order of business was to upgrade my desktop to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) from 8.04 (Hardy Heron). This didn’t go as smooth as I had hoped and was not as smooth as my previous experiences with Ubuntu release upgrades (I had even upgraded a virtual machine running on VMWare Fusion on my MacBook at work with zero problems). It turned out that my video cards (it’s a gaming machine pulling double duty as an Ubuntu desktop) were configured in SLI and the driver installed with 8.10 didn’t support my cards (2x Nvidia GEForce 8600 GT). It took quite a bit of messing around, but I finally determined I needed to download the latest (beta) driver from Nvidia, compile and install, and also make one change to the configuraion file (I needed to add a BusId “1:0:0″ line to the Device section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file). This complete, I upgraded to OpenOffice 3.0, installed Songbird, Gnome Do, Avant, and a few other odds and ends. Overall was not too big of a hassle, but I can imageine if I wasn’t familiar with downloading drivers and compileing them I would have been up a creek. With that said, at least there were drivers…
Even though I had that problem with the desktop, I upgraded my MythTv box (Mythbuntu) and another Ubuntu desktop with no problems. I decided to leave my Webserver (blackcow) as it is running Ubuntu 8.04 which is a LTS or Long Term Support release and the laptop isn’t doing much but sitting under my desk serving up the occasional blog entry.
I did upgrade my WordPress version on blackcow with no problems (which prompted me to write this blog entry).