Another Gutsy major update before the release, but this one was painless

You may remember that I did a major Ubuntu upgrade back on the 5th, and I ended up with some pretty bad video issues. I saw that there were some updates earlier this evening, including another rather minor kernel upgrade, from 2.6.22-13 to 2.6.22-14 and the obligatory video driver upgrades. The change notes weren’t available yet so I waited until I could see what was being changed.

I finally checked again and saw all the change notes for the over 60 programs that wanted to be upgraded so I hit the nice, friendly Install Updates button. (Not to be confused with a big red button that should never ever be pushed. Bonus points if you caught the reference I just used. The first person to post the right answer in a comment will get a free Nanci’s Naughties tee if you’re on SecondLife.) When it was all done I crossed my fingers and rebooted my computer without running Envy to update the video drivers like I used to do all the time.

Other than the fact that the Grub menu (the menu that asks you what version of Ubuntu you want to run) selected the older kernel by default, I was able to get to my desktop with absolutely no problem. It was even a little faster to get to the desktop than with the -13 kernel. I still don’t get my full desktop effects available yet without running compiz --replace in my Terminal, but that’s something I’ll have to look into for later. As it is, it’s an easy thing to run since I can get into my Terminal and simply use the up arrow key to get back to it.

How to fix the Grub default issue

If you run into this it’s pretty easy to fix. Get into terminal and run gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst (you can substitute your favorite text editor for gedit, but you definitely want to back up the file in case you mess something up), enter your administrative password, and look st the top of the file for

## default num
# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify ’saved’ instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command ’savedefault’.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not change this entry to ’saved’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default 2

The number on that last line could be different, but to select the newest available kernel (the first one on the Grub list when you boot up) you will want to change it so it has

default 0

Save your changes, and the next time you boot your computer it should give you the newest kernel as the default selection. If it doesn’t, get into Ubuntu and double check your changes.

We’re now just 8 days away from the release of Ubuntu Gutsy, and as more updates come in I’ll let you know how things go for me. In the meantime you should definitely check out 10 Rocking Features in 10 Days – Countdown to Ubuntu 7.10 over on The Fridge, Ubuntu’s news portal. They started taking a new major feature a day for each of the last ten days before Ubuntu Gutsy is launched (or should that be uncaged?).