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Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade NIGHTMARE

Well, the Ubuntu team really screwed the pooch on the latest upgrade. I manage three Ubuntu machines, all with clean installs of 9.04. Well, I locally upgraded one of them, and tried to remotely upgrade the other two.

For the local upgrade I used the GUI, and for the remote systems I used do-release-upgrade as instructed.

All three upgrades failed, in various ways.

The local upgrade lost its internet connection. I had to MANUALLY select the Wired Connection 1 after upgrade.

The two remote ones failed (I had to visit the machines) on reboot, failing to mount the file system.

Then one (perhaps two) of the remote systems did an interface swap, rendering them inaccessible on the internet.

It seems this particular upgrade was not tested sufficiently prior to release, as any google search on this upgrade will show.

This was the Vista of Ubuntu upgrades for me and many others. A complete disaster, and likely to throw beginners off of Ubuntu and linux for a long time.

I was buried in command line hell for hours to get this upgrade to finish, and needed a friend to fix the network problem introduced in this release.

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Technology & Gadgets

Setting up wview (5.5.4) on Ubuntu (9.0.4)

This is an update to a previous post covering the new process for setting up a dedicated server running Ubuntu server edition connected to a Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station console via a serial port. There are a few changes because of the architecture of the wview program changing databases from MySQL to SQLite. The machine was an IBM Aptiva 2198  (PIII) with 512MB of RAM, an upgraded Ethernet card and 250G internal hard disk.

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Technology & Gadgets

Ubuntu install error

I’ve found a number of references to the obscure error on the web:

Failure trying to run: chroot /target mount -t proc proc /proc

After careful diagnosis, I have come to the conclusion that this error has three causes (at least for me):

  1. A bad CD drive. [replace it]
  2. Bad CD-media or a badly written CD. [slow down the write, or change media]
  3. CD drive incorrectly connected (Cable Select, Master, Slave: incorrectly set) [check that cable and setting match, and that you have at least 1 Master connected, with the drive either set to CS or Master on a proper cable]

I hope posting this helps other people, as this problem took quite a while to diagnose, and much hair-pulling was involved. In my case, it was a “gradually” degrading CD drive (1), although I’ve also experienced (2).

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Technology & Gadgets

Setting up wview (3.9.0) on Ubuntu (8.04)

I decided to document my setup of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron running with a weather station, the inexpensive WS-2310. I built this computer setup for a buddy who wanted to run a weather station, but didn’t want to buy a Davis Vantage Pro2. The machine is a Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 80G HDD, 1 GB of RAM.

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Technology & Gadgets

Booting Ubuntu installer off flash

I was trying to setup a buddy’s old laptop to run Ubuntu and wviewweather, and having no luck because his CD-ROM drive was flaky. So i found this great utility (OK, google found it) that sets up a USB flash drive so that it will boot as if it were the CD-ROM. This is: UNetbootin. Tell it where to find the ISO, tell it where your flash is, and ta-dah! Great utility.

No, copying the files from the ISO onto blank USB memory stick doesn’t work, in case you were wondering…

To give a little more detail, wview now supports a very inexpensive weather station, the La Crosse 2310 (I bought it for $120 including shipping off eBay). This is great for those who want to participate in CWOP and can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money to get a $400+ Davis Vantage weather station, and have an old PC with a serial port lying around.

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Technology & Gadgets

Playing house with Gutsy Gibbon

Well, rumors of a user-friendly installation and easy compatibility for Ubuntu 7.10 are greatly exaggerated. Although it’s easy to use, it’s really quite difficult to install. Here are some of my trials and tribulations, and how I fixed them.

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Technology & Gadgets

Linux installed

Finally got my first LINUX server up-and-running for the fire department. It’s a great indication of how some distributions are much better than others. Read on to see how it progressed.

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