Edgy Eft upgrade (from 6.06 to 6.10).

I upgraded this last weekend to the latest Ubuntu, and I spent a good part of the weekend doing it. In my experience, I've only had a few upgrades go smoothly, but that's probably because I usually end up installing something on my system that doesn't come with the regular distribution, or I setup something in a different way than expected. When writing scripts to run an upgrade, I suppose there are only a certain number of scenarios that one can expect to encounter.

My laptop is an emachines m6805, which has an Athlon64, Broadcom BCM4306 wireless and a 64MB ATI 9600 Mobility Radeon. I had XGL working before the upgrade, but I lost that (I needed to compile lots of stuff from source to get compiz to work right). Now I can't even start Gnome using the binary ATI drivers. I have my wireless working though, which is the more important part.

My biggest problem during the upgrade was, from I could tell, my wireless. I use ndiswrapper to get my card to work. Upstart, the new system init, was having problems getting wireless working, and then seemed to either just get stuck or crash (since modprobe reported an error). When I upgrade the kernel manually, I normally go and recompile the ndiswrapper code and re-install the driver for good measure. Then all is well. In this case, since upstart didn't seem to want to finish, my filesystem never remounted read/write, so I had to enter the command manually, then fix the problem.

One other interesting thing worth noting about the upgrade is that all my leds, at one point, turned off. Other than that, the bootup (now that all is well) seems faster, and I'm usually connected to the wireless sooner (during the login process).

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