Starting the move to Ubuntu Gutsy while still running Feisty

(This post was actually written by my brother Peng, so I’ve changed the authorship to Peng. While I actually wrote it, the truth is that he pretty much dictated the post to me and deserves the credit for it. We apologize for any deception that you now feel. . -Nanci)

In my first post on this blog I mentioned that I was using the Feisty Fawn version of Ubuntu Linux (version 7.04) and I was looking forward to upgrading to the new Gutsy Gibbon version (7.10) when it hits beta tomorrow, although I had concerns about my video drivers. walkerk wrote a great tutorial over on the Ubuntu Forums about upgrading to the new kernel (base files for the operating system) and after getting caught up with reading over 50 pages of the thread I finally decided to take the plunge. While I did had a glitch with the video drivers it was an easy fix and even while running Ubuntu Feisty I’m noticing some improvements.

Warning: Some pretty heavy geek-speak is included, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

If you’re looking for information on actually making the upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy you want this post.

First off, let me give you some basics about computer. It’s a custom box, not a brand name computer, with these basic components:

• Intel D845GLVA motherboard with onboard networking
• Intel Celeron 2.20GHz processor
• 766MB RAM
• Nvidia GeForce2 MX/PCI graphics card
• 1.0-9639 Video drivers installed via Envy
• Ubuntu 7.06 Feisty Fawn

Yes, I know, it’s practically ancient, but it’s a third-hand computer which is good enough for me until I can afford to buy a new one. When I got it it had Windows XP installed on it, but I moved to Ubuntu a little under a year ago. As I said before, I still keep Windows around for two programs that either run too slowly under Wine or just don’t work right being virtualized.

When I started the upgrade I was using the 2.6.20-16-generic kernel (core operating system files). I had actually just upgraded to that version a day or so earlier when my Upgrade Manager told me it was available, and that upgrade was pretty painless. Things were running pretty well, but I’ve been reading about the Gutsy version of Ubuntu long enough to really want to try it, even before the official release (I’m kind of weird that way. ) I found walkerk’s thread a few days ago (I don’t remember who I came across it, but I think it was while checking new posts to Ubuntu’s forums) and thought it might be a great way to start the move to Gutsy without doing the full full upgrade yet. I saw several people reporting no problems, and while some people reported having problems the entire community pitched in to help get them resolved. That’s one of the things I love about Ubuntu and open source software in general, you’re not left to the mercy (and pernicious) whims of the corporate developers. The community really wants to see everyone get their problems fixed and usually go the extra mile to get issues resolved.

Before I read the entire thread I was a little concerned because I’m using such an old and underpowered computer, plus just about every time I get a kernel upgrade I’ve had video issues. Envy has been a big help in getting my video issues resolved, even with such an old video card, plus the latest kernel upgrade was a piece of pastry thanks to running Envy before I rebooted so I thought it might be doable with a minimum of issues. walkerk wrote a great little script for doing the heavy lifting, although I saw a lot of people using his manual instructions. The manual instructions make use of the command line, which doesn’t frighten me at all (other than typos when I don’t copy and paste), and I knew I’d be trying the manual version if the script gave me issues. I downloaded the script, fired it up, and after asking a few questions of me it let me know it was ready to reboot. Before letting that happen I pointed my computer to the software repository for the Gutsy version (basically the library of programs you can install really easily in Linux), and ran through the procedure I had developed for updating my video drivers when upgrading my kernel that worked so well when I got the 2.6.20-16-generic kernel a day or two earlier. In a nutshell, it’s this:

1. Fire up Envy and remove my current video drivers (you can do this without rebooting, which is much easier than the reboot after every software install that Windows insists on)
2. Without closing Envy, install the new video drivers, letting it build (actually create) the new drivers according to the needs of new new kernel
3. Reboot the computer

Before rebooting, I told my computer to forget about the Gutsy repository (or repo, as we call them) since I didn’t want Ubuntu to try to get me to download a bunch of Gutsy upgrades when I rebooted. This is because walkerk’s instructions are very explicit about this in red bold text.

Do not upgrade any packages while you have the Gutsy repository open.

Why is this such a big deal? Because operating systems have problems when you mix versions of programs too much. If I were to accept the 90+ updates from the Gutsy repo while still running Ubuntu Feisty I can pretty much guarantee you that I would have broken my computer, and I really don’t want to do that. It’s bad enough that I over the weekend I was moving the /home directory (the place where a good 90% of my personal files and customizations are stored) to a new partition and messed up my computer to the point where I had to reinstall Ubuntu, I didn’t want to have to do another reinstall again so soon. (I was moving the /home directory because when I first installed Ubuntu I didn’t realize what a good idea having it on it’s own partition (hard drive section) was. And I wasn’t following the instructions for making the move closely enough. Yes, even we geeks get careless and screw up royally from time to time. It wasn’t as bad as typing format c: in Windows, but I did lose some fairly important things because I wasn’t careful enough. But I digress.

After rebooting I realized I had messed up in installing the new video drivers with the information in the Gutsy repos, and I got the all too familiar screen saying that the operating system couldn’t find any screens to run on. I’ve dealt with this so much it didn’t faze me as much as it used to. When I was first installed Ubuntu and told it to use my Nvidia graphics card I saw this and I darned near started pulling out my hair trying to figure out how to fix it. But I’ve learned a lot in the past year, and Envy came in really handy for me. (You remember Envy, right? It’s what I said I used to install my video drivers at the top of the post.) Envy isn’t just good because it lets me install video drivers for my Nvidia card while in Ubuntu’s pretty graphical interface, it also works for people with ATI video cards, and ATI video cards have long been a thorn in the side of Linux users.

Envy also has a way to run it without having the pretty graphical interface loaded. When you get the screens saying there’s a problem just get past the error screens by saying OK and log in when the black and white screen asks you to. You may have to press Alt-F1 to get to the login prompt, I honestly don’t remember now, and if you think you’re in DOS, you’re not that far off. Just log in so you can do things and when the friendly prompt comes up telling you that Ubuntu’s text interface is ready for use type this and hit Enter: sudo envy -t

For those who are wondering what the hell that means, sudo tells the the computer to run something with full administrative privileges, and the -t after envy tells it to run in the text mode since the pretty way of running Envy isn’t available right now. You’ll have to enter your administrative password that you set up when you first installed Ubuntu, but you’re presented with the standard options to run for Envy. I told Envy to install the Nvidia drivers (using the information in the Feisty repos since it no longer knew anything about the Gutsy repos) and Envy happily created the appropriate driver and told me it needed to reboot. I may not have needed to do this, but since I don’t know how to manually restart the graphical interface off the top of my head I just let it reboot.

I had already seen that Ubuntu wanted to use the new 2.6.22-generic kernel, which means that walkerk’s script seems to have done it’s job properly. I told my computer to use it, and I went off to finish fixing a cup of coffee that I started while I first started rebooting after running the script. I got back to find my desktop, which meant everything worked that time. I went about what I wanted to do on my computer, and noticed some extra speediness in how my computer worked, but I wasn’t sure if it was due to the new kernel or due to the rather fresh installation of Ubuntu.

All of that was last night, and today I did a reboot just to clean things up (I do that every now and then, especially after I’m in SecondLife since it doesn’t always release the resources it uses) and this last reboot was indeed faster than I’m used to, even after the fresh install over the weekend. My brother and I posted the results to the Ubuntu Forums (he has an account there, but I never have created one yet. I should probably do that, shouldn’t I.), and it was so helpful that walkerk not only added using Envy for installing the Nvidia drivers to his original post, he quoted our three posts about the upgrade in the thread into a single post and linked to it on his original post in the thread. We feel so special.

We’re probably going to take the upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy tomorrow once the beta version is released, and the developer of Envy has even posted some instructions for getting it to work under Ubuntu Gutsy, which was one of our big sticking points about doing the full upgrade. There is a big warning that his instructions may break your computer, and he plans on updating Envy to work properly with Ubuntu Gutsy when it’s officially released, but for now it’s use with caution. The comments on the post show that it generally works very well, with a few glitches on a few Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, but some people say that their ATI graphics cards finally work properly with Ubuntu, so plans are for this computer to get the upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy once it’s released and we’re awake enough to do some tech work.

What’s the big deal about Ubuntu Gutsy and why are we so anxious to use it?

You can already download the LiveCD and check it out like we did, but we had issues with the Nvidia graphics card (not surprisingly, although we didn’t see the failsafe mode we expected to see in Herd 5). But you can see for yourself what’s so great about it but reading the early review on OSNews as well as the writeup on Earthweb. You can also read the GNOME 2.20 Release Notes to see all the goodies in this newest version of the kernel, just keep in mind that most of these goodies will be available in Ubuntu Gutsy, not just in the updated kernel itself.

Why not? Because the changes are in more than just the kernel, and to get them in Ubuntu Feisty you have to do what walkerk specifically said not to do, namely to accept all of the updates while your computer knows about the Gutsy repos. As we’ve already said, doing this can break your computer to the point of being FUBAR. Even I don’t want to have to deal with that mess, and I’ve learned quite a bit since I started using Ubuntu last fall.

Full Disclosure: We were able to check the Ubuntu Gutsy Live CD out by using the Intel graphics system on our motherboard, but it’s not something we want to do on a regular basis. We could have installed it on this computer over the weekend, but we decided we wanted to stick with the version we know a little longer, and not have to deal with chasing down bugs since we were already losing enough time with the reinstall as it is. But Ubuntu Gutsy hits beta at midnight so don’t be surprised if I report that we’ve made the upgrade to the blog tomorrow. What can I say? Peng’s got me being a bit of a cutting edge geek, if not a bleeding edge geek. Although after looking at the early versions of Firefox 3 I’m sticking with Firefox 2 a while longer. My Gmail Notifier addon to Firefox flat out doesn’t work in Firefox 3 yet, and I rely on it too much to check my various Gmail accounts to want to surf the web without it.