The World of Stuff .com

The 5th semiannual Ubuntu upgrade post

Ah, the thrill of the upgrade. The excitement of downloading all-new versions of your favorite software, and the very real possibility that your entire system could get hosed. After a series of relatively uneventful upgrades, I wondered when my luck would run out.

So Ubuntu 9.04 (insert codename that no one likes here) came out on Thursday. As I’ve been doing for the past few upgrades, I downloaded the alternate install CD (although I used BitTorrent this time).

Once I got that going, the actual upgrade went pretty smoothly… until the end, when Ubuntu said that the installation failed due to a broken package. It was Bonager, an old program I installed from a third-party .deb package and used for a while but wasn’t using anymore. I went to Synaptic and it told me to try sudo apt-get -f install, but that didn’t work. After some Googling, I found this, which got rid of the program.

sudo update-rc.d -f bonager remove
sudo rm /etc/init.d/bonager
sudo dpkg -P --force-all bonager

Thinking that was over with, I went to the Update Manager to see if there were any new updates since the release. The Upgrade Manager told me I had to do a partial upgrade, presumably because of the broken package mess. I started that, and it asked me to insert a CD. I hit cancel, and it continued for a bit but then stopped without explanation. I tried again, and the partial upgrade would start but then the window would disappear. I tried it on the command line (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) and the reason was that there were more broken packages, presumably caused by the breakage of the first one. sudo apt-get -f install actually fixed the problem, and I ran the upgrade again on the command line without any problems.

The ordeal caused me a lot of grief, but at least there weren’t sharks involved.

I like the new version of Ubuntu. There haven’t been too many funky changes to trip me up, and there have been some little improvements here and there. You can now change gedit‘s syntax highlighting from the status bar; Rhythmbox‘s gapless playback allows songs to finish; Transmission allows bandwidth limit scheduling. As usual, Ubuntu has thrown in some new fonts, but I actually like them. They’re the Liberation fonts, which are apparently metric-compatible with certain popular fonts. They also look pretty slick, like you’d find them in a book or magazine that was trying to look cool. And the new pop-up notifications aren’t that bad. I just wish I could customize them. The little preferences app does nothing.

Some reviews I’ve read assert that subtle improvements have made the Ubuntu experience better overall, and I find myself agreeing. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but OpenOffice.org and Firefox even seem a bit zippier. It’s almost as if Firefox is saying, “Yes, Jordon, install as many extensions as you want!!”

Probably my favorite improvement is the inclusion of Ekiga 3.2, which has buddy list capabilities so you can actually see whether other people are online. At this juncture I’d like to renew my perennial plea for Ekiga contacts. You know, just say hi or something. I’m sip:jordon@ekiga.net. Pretty easy to remember. (It’s also available for Windows!) I really wish there were something like a “Skype Me” forum for SIP users. I’ve even thought of creating something like that myself. Seriously, there must be some people who use SIP for fun, right? How are they supposed to contact each other?

Clerkdogs provides movie recommendations from former video store clerks. The recommendations are supposed to be all the better for it. (Via The Presurfer)

Here’s a USA Sitcom Map showing the settings of sitcoms across the country. There’s a whole map for New York City as well. (Via waxy.org)