Since I’m making the move to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in order to try to chase down some issues in the Mac4Lin 1.0 RC under Intrepid I thought I’d go ahead and write a post as I go through the upgrade. My system hardware hasn’t changed since I moved to Hardy, and there’s a picture on the right of what my desktop looks like (with some details in the AWN Terminal) as I get ready to run the update.
I thought about installing Intrepid on a virtual machine so I could test it with Mac4Lin without risking any issues to my current set up, but I decided against that. I used to have a virtual machine set up back when I was dual booting with Windows XP, but I uninstalled the virtual machine software when I kicked Windows out and don’t want to take the time to get everything set back up right now. I did run through Caspar Clemens Mierau’s pre-update todo list that I mentioned yesterday and made one final check of the release notes to make sure there was nothing I needed to address before starting the update. I had already seen that the logout applet is changed for Intrepid, although it’s not being changed automatically during the update (yet), but other than that I saw no last-minute gotchas. I had already run the network update check and cleaned out things I didn’t use anymore so with a final morning email check, PDA sync and final system backup I was ready to rock. I also disabled my autologin so I could see the login screen for Intrepid, although I decided to keep my current Mac4Lin settings to see if anything breaks during the upgrade.
I’d already run the Intrepid beta LiveCD (actually a daily build DVD from 2 October, the same day the beta came out) so I knew that while the GRUB splash screen hasn’t changed there are new login sounds that have grown on me since I first mentioned them almost a month ago. I also knew the default desktop wallpaper is much prettier in Intrepid, ditching the animal-centric wallpaper of old for a more stylized one, although I’m now seeing that it’s changed in the last week to an image I’m not thrilled with so I’d better snag it while it’s still in reach. Or perhaps I may simply lock the version of ubuntu-wallpapers to 0.27, which is the one I prefer.
Since I have the LiveDVD from 2 October and even though some of the files have changed since I got the iso I decided to not upgrade via update-manager -d and use my LiveDVD to update. In the past I’ve managed to insert a LiveCD and got a dialog offering to run an upgrade, but it may not work yet with Intrepid DVDs. I did see a script called cdromupgrade so I opened a Terminal window, navigated to the disk with cd /media/cdrom0 and launched the script with http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading. Survey said…
tar: ./dists/stable/main/dist-upgrader/binary-all//intrepid.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Could not find the upgrade application in the archive, exiting
Okay, so that won’t work. To make sure I wasn’t looking at any problems I didn’t have with the 2 October DVD build I ended up grabbing a new disk image so I could check a LiveCD based on the packages a dist-upgrade would use. The worst part was waiting, for about an hour, for the new iso to download. Son of a gun, when I closed the drive with the disk in the tray in preparation of booting from it to check my system with the updated LiveDVD I was presented with a dialog box.
That’s what I had expected from the older disk. I clicked on the Run upgrade button, entered in my admin password, and started the process. 
The Distribution Upgrade window popped up, and a dialog came up asking if I wanted to include the latest updates from the ‘net (sorry, I didn’t grab a screenshot of it), and I said yes. It did take a little longer, but my system was up to date by the time the process was done and my system rebooted. I had already disabled the PPAs in my repo list so nothing would get updated using those repos. I got a warning about the fact that drivers for my older Nvidia card were missing, something I suspected would be coming from the release notes (I need to fix links in recent posts to point to this version of the notes, which I really wished I had seen again sooner), but I took the update anyway figuring I’d get some drivers for it through Envy if nothing else worked, not having understood quite what the continuing issue was since the recent links I had seen to Intrepid release notes were a much shorter page. I figured I may end up losing some Desktop Effects until I got working drivers but that’s a small issue. (or so I thought.) I got a listing of apps that would be changed, and I saw that some of AWN looked like it might get removed, but I knew there were packages available for Intrepid so I didn’t worry about it.
After the reboot I did find that my desktop effects were disabled, and the Appearance Preferences gave me some complaints that the GTK+ theme engine isn’t installed, but I had heard that was coming as well. I did get a message about changing the old Quit Applet to the updated Fast User Switch Applet and accepted the change. It now takes up a bit of space with my name, which I intentionally didn’t have on the panel, 
and now instead of getting a dialog popped up it gives me a dropdown menu asking me what I wanted to do. Plus the startup sounds aren’t the ones I prefer, but I’ll see about rolling back to an older version of the sounds later.
There are a couple of things I’ll need to address, but I’ll put them in another post so this one isn’t quite so Jabba-sized. Plus I see there are some updates that may involve my Nvidia drivers so I’m going to close this post with a shot of my desktop, now about a day and a half after making the upgrade and with a panel at the bottom instead of the AWN dock. I’ll start the next post once I get rebooted after taking these upgrades and seeing if I get my Desktop Effects back. There are a few changes in Intrepid that I want to make sure I tell you about. Most are good, but one or two are issues you need to be aware of.
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