So, I’m here at the house, looking at one of my breezy boxes, and I figure, “Hey, I wonder how that new graphical upgrade manager thing works.” For those not in the know, the Ubuntu update manager program has been modified to allow you to graphically upgrade from one Ubuntu version to another (in this case; breezy -> dapper).

I’ve followed the process defined “gksudo update-manager -d” and sure enough, I got all the graphical stuff that appears on Daniel’s blog (linked above). The process is running now, and seems to have 1 hour 6 minutes remaining.

One important thing to note: once the process finishes downloading all the packages, and begins installing them, you probably want to click on the “terminal” button to drop down the terminal output of the dist-whiprush^W dist-upgrade process. On my box, it was waiting for me to answer a couple of reconfiguration questions around exim and a couple of other packages - if I wouldn’t have done that the update manager would have sat there indefinitely, awaiting my command.

However, this seems pretty damn cool, though. Kudos to the Ubuntu team!

Went fairly smooth - considering this was a Warty -> Hoary -> Breezy box, and now it’s Dapper.

Things I had to do manually:

• apt-get –purge remove my old custom builds of NetworkManager
• X was broken, but I had no problems running “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” to reconfigure X - it came up in 3D accelerated mode just fine after that.
• I had to manually apt-get install the latest kernel - might have been due to some goofy kernel stuff I had done on my own.
• Due to the kernel upgrade, I had to reinstall VMWare Server.

That’s it. Nice job, folks - was a very easy upgrade, all in all - makes me confident I can upgrade my main machine (the FujiP) without a hitch. :)

Several of us were talking about glasspack mufflers in #linux (off topic? nah.) and I mentioned my first car, my ‘79 GMC pickup. Ah, you never forget your first… she had a 350 smallblock, stroked and bored to 383 cubic inches. Edelbrock performer manifold, QuadraJet carb, Posi-Traction rearend, and all kinds of other speed goodies, including the aforementioned glasspack mufflers. There’s nothing quite like the sound of those two monster secondary barrels on a Q-Jet at WOT. BUUUUUUHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! 14.6 in the quarter-mile, not bad for a 5000 lb. brick. Here’s a pic of the truck. As my buddy Moazam said when he saw the pic, “Man, that’s totally Dukes of Hazzard.”

Fuck yeah.

I just was notified that I should make the kernel headers available as well, so people can build other modules.

Here they are.

Crap. Was also asked to provide the source.

Here’s the source.

Yet another edit: was asked to provide the actual patch.

Here is the patch.

I’ve finally migrated off the old Movable Type blog engine, and onto WordPress. I must say, WordPress is nice, and hopefully its built in antispam engine will keep the crapflooding I’ve been experiencing from happening any more.