On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:33:48PM +0100, Simon Elliott wrote:

Barrys linux mail wrote:

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Hi I am thinking of upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04 Lts, but not sure if it will work on my laptop which has 380 meg memory and Pent 3 processor, also when I upgraded from 7.06 to 7.10 it lost all the wireless wep settings. How do I avoid this this time if I upgrade? Has anyone upgraded yet? Also see that new version better with utube video, which seems to broken on my system know even though it did work. something to do with Adobe flash !

If I was you I'd consider Xubuntu for an all round faster Ubuntu experience.

http://xubuntu.org/ of course.. 8.04 is brilliant. Unfortunately the best way to get it is to do a fresh install, however if you backup your

Yes, I'd agree with that, I nearly always do a clean install when upgrading. Apart from anything else it loses all the various bits of junk you inevitably accumulate.

entire home directory including all the hidden folders, you will retain most if not all your settings. Not sure about wireless settings though.. Have a little Google around to find out where they're stored.

Depending on how the disk is partitioned (i.e. if /home is a separate partition) you may simply be able to upgrade the installation and retain /home. I'd still back it up though, it's very easy to confuse partitions at install time.

Wireless settings (and other similar system wide settings) will probably be in /etc, make a copy of that and then use information from the old one to configure the new one.

2008/5/1 Chris G cl@isbd.net:

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If I was you I'd consider Xubuntu for an all round faster Ubuntu experience.

http://xubuntu.org/ of course.. 8.04 is brilliant. Unfortunately the best way to get it is to do a fresh install, however if you backup your

Yes, I'd agree with that, I nearly always do a clean install when upgrading. Apart from anything else it loses all the various bits of junk you inevitably accumulate.

...

entire home directory including all the hidden folders, you will retain most if not all your settings. Not sure about wireless settings though.. Have a little Google around to find out where they're stored.

Depending on how the disk is partitioned (i.e. if /home is a separate partition) you may simply be able to upgrade the installation and retain /home. I'd still back it up though, it's very easy to confuse partitions at install time.

Wireless settings (and other similar system wide settings) will probably be in /etc, make a copy of that and then use information from the old one to configure the new one.

-- Chris Green

I've upgrade to 8.04. As I had my /home dir on a separate partition I just reinstalled /, as mentioned above I believe this is the best way to do it.

But I've two problems. 1/ I can no longer use the numeric key pad. Nothing happens if I use these keys, regardless or weather num lock is on or not. It used to worked on 7.10. Got any ideas as what I can check or change.

2/ I installed 8.04 onto my wifes laptop (I convinced her to drop WinXP in favour of Ubuntu), but compriz is not working. The laptop is an ASUS Aspire 1300 with a ProSavage (KN133) graphics chip. Which as I understand support 3D with the savage xorg driver. I think the problem is that the new xorg is not detecting the ProSavage correctly as it seems to be using the vesa driver. Can anyone tell me how to change the drive the X uses?

Thanks

2008/5/1 Richard Lewis richardlewis@fastmail.co.uk:

You could try installing numlockx

$ sudo aptitude install numlockx

Also try checking your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Mine has this in it:

Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Generic Keyboard" Driver "kbd" Option "CoreKeyboard" Option "XkbRules" "xorg" Option "XkbModel" "pc104" Option "XkbLayout" "gb" # is this right? Option "XkbVariant" "gb" Option "XkbOptions" "altwin:super_win" EndSection

though yours may not necessarily work with these options.

And have you checked to make sure it's not a desktop environment thing? Are you using GNOME? Have you checked in a console? Or with a different window manager?

Cheers, Richard --

Thanks Richard,

I forgot to add an important bit of info. I am using using GNOME as my window manager. The num keypad works in my wife's account. The only difference is that her account was created from scratch during the reinstall, and my account was the one used for 7.10. So I'm guessing that it is GNOME setting, but I just can't find it.

Torben Stones wrote:

But I've two problems. 1/ I can no longer use the numeric key pad. Nothing happens if I use these keys, regardless or weather num lock is on or not. It used to worked on 7.10. Got any ideas as what I can check or change.

When I upgraded one machine (at an early beta stage), the keypad got switched into a mode where it mimics the mouse. If that's happened to you:

System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, on the Mouse Keys tab, turn off the checkbox "Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard"

No idea why it happened, until now I'd only seen it on my PC (and I have no idea if this is your problem or not).

NB: I reported the wording of that dialogue as a bug, its a bit confusing.

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 14:48 +0100, Brett Parker wrote:

Ubuntu and Debian both *strive* to make *UPGRADES* work, why crap on that hard work with a reinstall?!

I second that.

This desktop started on Hoary and has been upgraded (usually before official release) at every stage through to Hardy. I have had exactly two problems that I wouldn't have encountered if I had done a fresh installation.

1/ At some point (I think it was the Dapper upgrade) my profile didn't inherit the new pixmaps for various icons..everything still worked but it all looked like it did before when logged in as myself. Easy to fix and not really a huge problem to start with.

2/ When upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy something horrible happened to compiz, I think I had some legacy stuff stuck in gconf but the outcome was that some of the plugins refused to retain their settings between reboots. I am pretty sure I could have fixed it but in the end I got bored and just moved everything to a new user profile. To be fair I think this was a result of installing various non packaged builds of various compiz bits before it officially worked on AMD64 and moving between XGL, AIGLX and the built in Nvidia render path whilst also going from Compiz--Beryl--Compiz-fusion. Normal people would not I suspect have encountered this problem.

The upshot is that in both cases there my problems stemmed from /home as they were user specific so had I done the reinstall but retain home trick I probably would have still encountered them (or worse)

As Brett points out Debian/Ubuntu put a fair amount of effort into making sure upgrades just work, this is even more true for Hardy as it also has to support upgrades direct from Dapper. You might actually get more breakage by effectively isolating all your user specific settings whilst upgrading (by keeping /home untouched) that you would do by letting the upgrade do it's thing.

I think the only time I would suggest a clean installation over an upgrade is when either you have lots of third party packages installed, you have installed lots of things from tarballs (which of course the package manager won't be aware of), or you know for other reasons that your system is a mess.