Slowly, more and more of my computers are running Linux and recently, I’ve been upgrading a few of them to the latest version called Lucid Lynx.

My adventures started on an old IBM Thinkpad R51 that I have. It is a pretty beat up old laptop that stopped running Windows years ago. So, I installed Linux and it has run fairly well for me, with the exception that it often got the dreaded “Aw, Snap!” message. For a long time it happened rarely enough that I could still use Chromium with minor annoyances. However, recently, it started getting worse and worse until it got to the point that every time I tried to open a page with Chromium, I got an “Aw, Snap!” message.

So, I started the upgrade. Unfortunately, at various points, the upgrade got interrupted. Eventually, it succeeded enough so that I could get to a command prompt and connect with a Ethernet connection. By running various combinations of apt-get upgrade -f and dpkg --configure -a, eventually it got to a point where it would boot all the way.

When I finally got the box running, the nautilus file manager looped and started bring up window after window. The only thing I could do was shut down. I tried various things, like removing and reinstalling nautilus, and finally ended up with the session manager not working. Whenever I tried to login, I would get a black screen and get taken back to the session manager. So, I logged in with a command prompt and installed xubuntu-desktop. I like that session manager better and now the old machine is up and running fine, with the exception that Chromium remains unusable. Instead of nautilus, I’m using thunar as my file manager which is part of the xubuntu project. For more information on different session managers for Ubuntu, check out Install Alternative Desktop Managers in Ubuntu

With that completed, I figured it was time to upgrade the office server. It was already running xubuntu. This upgrade went much more smoothly with a few different considerations. First, it was running an even older version of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope. Also, I had all kinds of interesting packages I had added to the server.

First, I upgraded from Jaunty Jackalope to Karmic Koala. This upgrade, while slow, went smoothly somewhat smoothly. Most of the packages I had been running continued to run fine, although I did have some problems with Samba which I figured I’d come back to.

The next upgrade I did was from Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx. This upgrade presented more difficulties. During the upgrade process, it asked if I wanted to keep various configuration files and change them. As a general rule, I keep them, because I’ve made a lot of tweaks. Unfortunately, the comparison between the files during the upgrade process isn’t always clear, and there isn’t, as far as I know, the ability to change a configuration file to take a little from both files.

That is what I really needed during the upgrade of MySQL. I had been running MySql 5.0, and upgrading to Lucid Lynx upgraded MySql to 5.1. During the updates, AppArmour hung. Ultimately, I killed it and took the messages about having a damaged configuration. I ran dpkg --configure -a, to try and repair it, and again AppArmour hung.

By searching around, I found that the MySql 5.1 gags if you have skip-bdb in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file. I commented out that line, and restarted the configuration. At this point MySql started up nicely and AppArmour had no problem. The key take-away: comment out the skip-bdb line in your my.cnf file before upgrading to MySql 5.1, either directly, or as part of a Lucid Lynx update.

Another problem that I ran into was with Samba. I don’t know how old the version of Samba was that I was running, but my smb.conf file was only nine lines long, describing the workgroup, netbios name, and the share. The suggested configuration file is now about 300 lines long, although over the majority of those lines are comments. Took the sample configuration file, tweaked it a bit to be similar to my old file and restarted Samba. Unfortunately, I still had problems mounting my shared directories to a Windows box.

It was all a problem in authentication. For some reason, one of the upgrades made screwed up the smbpasswd file. I was hoping that with comments about pam and unix password sync would mean that I could simply use my unix password. However, for some reason the passwords did not sync, so I used the smbpasswd command to set the Samba password. At this point, my directory shares started working as well.

I haven’t fully tested my configuration, but everything that I use on the normal day to day operations of the office server is working fine. In fact, both machines seem to be working much more quickly. Now, I need to decide when to update my daughter’s laptop, as well as a fifteen year old Windows NT server, and ultimately, production servers that I support running Hardy Heron.

Anyone else have any stories about upgrading various Linux boxes?