Dapper Drake to Hardy Heron upgrade

I took the plunge and decided to upgrade from Dapper Drake to Hardy Heron. I was motivated by the fact that Hardy is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and finding that fewer third-party software packages were being released in a format compatibly with Dapper.

I kicked off the upgrade with a simple:

sudo update-manager -d

and then clicking the "upgrade" button listed in the update manager. The upgrade notes suggest you can do this via gksu but I found I had to use sudo from a terminal command-line.

I ran the upgrade overnight so am not sure how long it actually took as there were user prompts waiting to be answered the next morning.

After upgrading I had only one major problem:

• the Nvidia video driver wasn't working, which I fixed after a lot of hassle,

and a few minor problems:

1. No sound from the Firefox Flash plugin if another audio application was running
2. No NFS client
3. Thunderbird Lightning extension not working (fix)
   
4. Rhythmbox intermittently crashing (workaround)
5. Java Swing applications, e.g. IntelliJ IDEA, now working with Compiz (workaround)
   

which were easily fixed.

Microphone Audio Capture Very Faint

After installing skype (via Synaptic) I found that audio captured via my microphone (plugged into the external jack) was almost inaudible on playback. Ultimately, I overcame this as follows:

1. From the command-line run alsamixer
2. Select the "Capture" channel and increase the recording levels, e.g. 75/75
3. In skype select Tools > Options... > Sound Devices > Audio System to use: ALSA
   

Flash audio problems in Firefox 2 - Solved

After upgrading to Firefox 2 I had problems with the Flash plugin no longer producing sound when another audio application was running - a problem I'd not previously had with Firefox 1.5.

The fix was fairly simple. I had libflashplayer.so in my .mozilla/plugins directory. This was being used by Firefox 2 for the application/x-shockwave-flash MIME type in preference to Shockwave Flash v9.0 (flashplugin-nonfree package).

After removing libflashplayer.so and flashplayer.xpt from my .mozilla/plugins directory audio playback works perfectly in the Flash plugin in Firefox 2.

Upgrading to Firefox2 using Ubuntuzilla

Since official support for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 expires at the end of June 2007, I decided to upgrade to Firefox 2.0. There are no official packages for Firefox 2.0 for Dapper Drake, so I followed the excellent instructions provided by Ubuntuzilla for installing the latest versions of Mozilla's Firefox, Seamonkey and Thunderbird.

At this stage I was only interested in upgrading Firefox, so I downloaded the ubuntuzilla.py script and ran

python ~/Desktop/ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p firefox

As noted, it is important to not uninstall the existing version of Firefox 1.5.

From now on I can simply use Firefox 2.0's built-in update mechanism to keep Firefox up-to-date.

I noticed two minor drawbacks resulting from the upgrade:

1. Font rendering is not as attractive in Firefox 2.0 as it was in 1.5
2. Sound in the Flash plug-in does not work if another audio application, e.g. Rhythmbox is being used. I must first exit all audio applications and restart Firefox to get sound working in the Flash plug-in. This was not the case in Firefox 1.5
   

Superuser (root) password and sudo

If, like me, you're coming to Ubuntu from a different distribution (Red Hat v9 in my case) then you might stumble in attempting to gain superuser privileges.

You don't need them; when prompted for the superuser password (by sudo or a graphical administration tool) simply provide the password of the user account created during the installation process.

Detailed information.

First boot and update

The first boot proceeded without incident.

After logging in the Software Updates tool notified me that three updates were available:

1. GNOME Application Installer (data files) - app-install-data: new version 0.1.33
2. GNOME Application Installer - gnome-app-install: new version 0.1.33
3. PCMCIA Card Services - pcmcia-cs: new version 3.2.8-5.2ubuntu6

These installed without incident.

Dapper Drake 6.06 First Installation

Ran the graphical installer from the Dapper Drake LiveCD.

Several basic settings questions (keyboard, language, timezone, hostname) are asked.

I added a single user account when prompted.

I created the following partitions:

• /boot (94MB; ext3)
  
• /swap (2GB; linux-swap)
• / (16GB; ext3)
  
• /home (31GB; ext3)
  

The installation itself ran in only a few minutes without any problems.

Upon reboot, I selected Windows XP to ensure that it was unaffected. It ran a chkdsk and after an automatic reboot it ran as normal.

I then booted Ubuntu for the first time...

Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)

Downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake ISO and burned it to CD-ROM.

Ran the memory test and checked the CD for defects. Both passed.

Ubuntu boots without any problems in LiveCD mode.