ubuntu upgrade
I recently got around to upgrading my development machines from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, mainly because 9.04 is now end of life.
The upgrade itself went very smoothly – just a case of agreeing to all the defaults and letting the upgrade software do it’s thing.
Everything was going well until the install completed and I got invited to restart the machine to complete the install… “no problem” I think, this has been the smoothest upgrade ever.
The computer restarts, I see a simple Ubuntu logo on both screens and then…. nothing. Both screens go blank and that’s how they stay. I can’t even Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a terminal. After some thought I recall that I put some proprietary ATI drivers on the 9.04 install to drive the ATI graphics card I use for dual monitors – I guess they don’t play nicely with X in Ubuntu 9.10. The problem then is probably in the xconfig
So here’s the solution that worked for me (I know there are probably more elegant solutions):
- Reboot the machine
- Opt for recovery mode from the Grub menu
- Choose “Drop to root shell with networking” from the recovery menu
- Delete the X config file (sounds scarier than it is)
> sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf
This got me back up and running, and there was need to download any extra drivers for 9.10; I simply used the System -> Preferences -> Display options to configure my monitors as I wanted them.
Calm has been restored to the Karmic Koala.
undocumentedtitle 
useful, thanks
The version numbers in Ubuntu refer to the year and month (yy.mm) of release mate. Is it possible that the hardware on your dev box is too modern for a 2 year old distro? Also, 10.04 is classed as LTS for long term support, meaning that if you get it settled the way you like it, Canonical promise to support it for probably the life of your dev box.
Yeah, I tend to stay behind the curve in terms of distributions for my development machines – stability is more important than new features. The issue was around the proprietary drivers being old and thus not playing nicely with the newer X install.
At some point soon I will make the move to 10.04… and probably add another entry here about the problems encountered 🙂