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How bad can it be? That was my thought as I started my upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu on Friday.

The answer is, “not that bad, but not that good, either.” If your not familiar with the Debian way of upgrading from one version to the next, let me explain. First, you change the distro name in the list of source repositories (from “dapper” to “edgy” in this case), then you refresh the package lists, then you run “apt-get dist-upgrade” (or its equivalent) and go out for coffee. When you return, you magically have an upgraded machine.

Or so they say - I’ve never quite gotten the first 3 steps to add up the that perfect result, except on installs so bare that it would have been easier to just re-install the whole system.

Anyway, my first attempt here at school hung during the package downloads, probably because of all the traffic on the mirrors from other eager upgraders, so I had to wait until the evening to have a stab at home.

As usual, the magic of dist-upgrade hit a minor snag - the two versions of pythoncard had similar version numbers, so apt-get got confused, one of those must remove, can’t remove, must remove, can’t remove… problems that had to fixed by using ‘dpkg -r python24-pythoncard’ to explicitly remove the old package. It seems like I always hit at least one of those. When I finally got back to the upgrade at school it was python-docutils that had that same problem.

On my Dell X1 laptop, I had a more serious problem. It needs the 915 library to use the wide screen, and that apparently upgraded just fine. The problem was that for some reason it failed to correctly update all of the xorg packages so I was left at the shell prompt. A resinstall of the xserver-xorg main packages fixed that, leaving me with just one annoying problem.

Emacs. On my laptop the fonts for emacs are broken, displaying the familiar little “I dunno how to make that character” boxes almost everywhere. And emacs segfaults whenever I try to go to the font configuration menus. Sigh.