March 11, 2008
Not Gutsy enough for more than Feisty
Ubuntu’s apt-get dist-upgrade is working much better than it used to. Actually I’m sure that it works exactly as it always has, it’s just how well all these ubuntu packages are reliable written to upgrade cleanly. When I tried it in updating my home desktop from Dapper to Edgy, that single act came with problems too numerous to count. So last weekend I decided I didn’t have enough excitement in my life and that I’d try the next dist-upgrade to Feisty Fawn. The upgrade took about 3-4 hours to download all the files. and about an hour to do the upgrades. However…
The only thing broken was the new installation of openoffice.org. When I tried to start it it crashed. When I ran ooffice -writer from the command line I got:
WARNING **: Unknown error forking main binary / abnormal early exit ...
Floating point exception (core dumped)
After about an hour cruising google, and trying an uninstall, and reinstall to no avail, the solution presented itself. the Xorg.conf file was hosed in the update and I needed to do:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
Other than the one Xorg snafu, there were no problems to speak of, much better than my last experience. Way to go Ubuntu! I still plan to stay at least one version behind the bleeding edge. I think that’s all my family can put up with.