Yet another blog for JBKempf - Tag - Upgrades

Ubuntu migrations to 8.10

JBK — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:51:00 -0800

This post is about the new update to Ubuntu 8.10, as usual.

This narrates the few issues that I had during the process...

Ubuntu new release

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is out since a few days, so I updated a few machines that I had around.

Those machines are mainly friends, parents and family, since I don't use Ubuntu.

This update seems to be pretty for many people on many forums...

Machines

I had 8 machines to migrate, 7 laptops, 4 of them were updating from Ubuntu 8.4 and the other had to migrate from 8.10.

Migrations

The migrations I did were always 7.10=>8.4=>8.10, because it seemed to be wiser.

Moreover, I tried both ways of using update-manager -d and edition of /etc/apt/sources.lists.

Results

8.4

The results of the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.4 were way better than when I did those updates when 8.4 was out.

I had one issue with one X.org with an outdated ATI driver, but it wasn't difficult to fix if you are not afraid of non-GUI edition of files.

8.10

The results of this migration were, as expected, not good.

Only one laptop, the one with the less packages and without Compiz worked out of the box, using update-manager.

Update

The upgrading process went bad for 3 machines, where some packages didn't want to get updated correctly, I had to use dpkg --force-all to fix those kind of issues.

Restart

The restart after upgrade were fast, and working more or less:

3 laptops work perfectly
3 of the remaining 5 have a broken X, and X taking 100% of proc or a faulting Compiz. One was ATI, the two others ones where nVidia.
3 had a non-working network stack, wireless or ethernet.
1 had no X, no wireless, no FireWire and a very slow startup;

Fixing

Most of the fixing where not difficult, but implied some of those:

X.org conffile edition
GNOME configuration files reset
Reinstallation of drivers
Deactivation of Compiz

And for the last and completly broken one, I reinstalled it from scratch.

Network Manager

On all of them, the new network manager is NOT able to connect to my FreeBox Wifi, that has been working for a long time now.

The issue is that this network manager doesn't seem to understand that a WPA2 password can be a passphrase and not only a HexaKey. Whenever I use the passphrase and fails to connect, it shows me an hexadecimal password that is not what I filed in.

Conclusion

Well, as usual, I am not impressed by the Ubuntu upgrade. It is a very good and easy-to-use distribution, but upgrading Ubuntu distribution is way more difficult than it should be.

Update to Vista SP1 (follow up) Failure 0x800F0826

JBK — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:36:00 -0800

Here I am, updating some old posts, that I had forgotten about...

Vista Update post

The first one is an update to a one-year-old post about a problem: during Vista SP1 update

Remembering the Issue

The issue was that:

And then Vista tells me it couldn't install my computer because error 0x800F0826.

And I was thinking of waiting for final release to fix it... Of course, it didn't work.

This happens when Vista Ultimate is used on a multiboot machine.

Solution

The solution was to give back the bootloader to Vista Bootloader and not Grub. So, configure again the Vista Bootloader and write changes to disk.

Then reboot and update to Vista SP1.

Reinstore Grub as your main Bootloader using the usual tools :D

Update from Windows Vista Ultimate to Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

JBK — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:55:00 +0100

This blogpost will be linear, following my progress of installation:

I did download the SP1 RC from Microsoft Website. This package is around 440MB. It took the French Version because my Vista Version is in French.

As I don't really use Vista at all, this is almost a clean installation of Vista.

Start

Once launched, the exe warns you that you need at least 7Gb of disk (sigh!) and that it can take up to one hour!

After a problem-less process and 15minutes of slider progression, the system reboots.

1st reboot

The start of the computer is a bit longer than usual. The usual 'Updates configuration' screen is shown. And it reboots another time without letting me log in.

2nd reboot

The system reboots for another long start, and yet another 'Updates configuration' screen instead of the login is shown. But then I can log without any problem.

Failure 0x800F0826

And then Vista tells me it couldn't install my computer because error 0x800F0826.

Googling it didn't really helped...

Let's try again. Re-check that my Vista is up to date. Reboot.

Try again

So I restarted the whole process. Reboot. update. Reboot automatically. Updates. Same error.

Conclusion.

I am not a computer illiterate, I have a legit Vista Ultimate Version, I fully made the updates before and follow the process like documented, but it still fails. I could try to read the logs or anything, but I won't. I'll wait for the official release.

Update

Solution can be found here: