Teleidoscope

Thu, Jan 04, 2007

Upgrading Kubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10

Posted at 9:50 pm MST to Technology

I generally like Kubuntu. The weird stuff they've done to the root userid still drives me crazy from time to time, but in general it's a nice distribution.

However...

The so-called upgrade mechanism for moving from 6.06 to 6.10 for Kubuntu users is appallingly bad. (I can't speak to the mechanisms provided for the other Ubuntu flavors). It took me 13 hours to get my system upgraded and back into the configuration I prefer, and a user who isn't an experienced Linux or UNIX admin would probably have panicked or ended up with a broken system, or both.

They really can't have it both ways: if they are going to aim at "inexperienced" users by mangling the root user and hide a lot of the admin info at boot time, etc. they need to make sure they put in place admin tools that don't require expertise, especially for something like an upgrade that might leave the user with a broken system and unable to get on-line to look for fixes.

Accurate upgrade instructions would help, too. The preferred method on the "How to Upgrade Ubuntu" page doesn't work with Kubuntu.

I suspect I broke the configuration for the debian font manager, but I'm not sure KDE cares about it. I'll fix it if I have problems viewing or printing special fonts. I suspect it handles primarily TTF fonts, and I prefer Type1.

The instructions I tried to follow were:

• Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all instances of dapper to edgy.
• In the console run: sudo apt-get update
• In the console run: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and follow the prompts to upgrade
• In the console run: sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop python-qt3 python-kde3 ubuntu-minimal and follow the prompts to install
• Reboot your computer.

which are the officially recommended steps for Kubuntu upgrades.

The first run of dist-upgrade failed to download some files.

The second run of dist-update spewed out a zillion warnings about

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

which were quite bogus. They happened because the locales did not get defined until near the end of the process.

The first run of install complained that there were unmet dependencies in the files that should have been updated in the previous step. So I re-ran 'update', re-ran 'dist-upgrade' with a -f option to get it to fix the dependencies, then ran them both again to make sure they reported clean. Then I re-ran the install step.

Finally I re-ran all three apt-get steps to make sure none of them found anything left to upgrade.

Then I rebooted the machine and held my breath. I spent all day yesterday doing a full backup and burning it to DVD, so if I would not have lost anything but a LOT of time. I never bothered with full backups when I upgraded between versions of RedHat and Fedora, and never had a problem, but the lack of a real update utility for Kubuntu had me worried.

Kubuntu 6.10 came up, but my widescreen display needed tweaking.

And then I went on-line looking for the FAQ howto's for fixing some of the "admin for dummies" misfeatures that Ubuntu and Kubuntu insist on: turning boot messages back on, putting my desktop icons back on the Desktop where they belong, and setting Konqueror back to the default configuration to get rid of the stupid, intrusive, and BROKEN 'Recent sites' item in the View menu. That Konqueror menu item was broken in 6.06 and I'm amazed they still have it there in 6.10. Maybe so many people just go back to the defaults that there is no pressure to get it fixed.

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Chinook

Posted at 7:57 am MST to Technology

The word 'chinook' means "snow-eater". There is a species of salmon called the chinook, but the use of the word that is important in Boulder is as the name of a kind of wind.

When the Front Range of Colorado gets heavy precipitation it is usually because wet air comes in from the East, and the water is too heavy to go over the mountains, so it falls on us.

A chinook is just the opposite: winds from the West that have dropped all their moisture on the Western slope. As the winds cross the peaks, and the air in them sinks, it also compresses and warms up.

The winds speed up, too: people in Boulder learn to be careful about leaving things out in their yards because we get hundred mile an hour winds a few times each year. These winds are (usually) less damaging than hurricanes because chinooks are dry and not pusshing the weight of water that is carried by a hurricane.

Sometimes the snow just evaporates without even really melting to any noticeable degree first.

Sometimes 100 mph is the low end of the wind speeds: there is a reason the National Center for Atmospheric Research is located on a mesa above Boulder. The Boulder winds break the windspeed gauges at NCAR fairly regularly.

My house is also on a mesa above Boulder, with about 10 miles of empty air between me and NCAR. Last night the wind was fairly noisy.

A chinook started at about noon yesterday. The high was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the overnight low (during the howling winds) never went below about 38, so this morning there are barepatches on the ground where the snow had drifted shallow. The places where the snow had drifted deep still have snow on them, but it is a lot shallower than it was yesterday morning.

My truck is actually in my driveway, not sitting at the end of it, for the first time in two weeks. This is good: they are predicting snow for tonight and tomorrow.

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