We have been using kUbuntu for about 3 years now and have always been slow to upgrade to newer versions, fearing the impending bug, broken configuration with hardware, or grub issues. So when 8.04 rolled out, having been using a 'fairly' stable 7.10, we were quite hesitant to change. However, we had finally decided to upgrade this past weekend, and to our suprise, everything was smooth....well somewhat....
During the upgrade our first, and really only, problem during the actual process was a hang issue during the locale script setup. We got stuck with a message seen below...
Generating locales...
en_AU.UTF-8...
Some quick googling showed that this was an extremely common issue, supposedly resolved according to the bug reports, that still remained. The workaround? Well quite easy and not as big of a problem as we thought it might be.
sudo killall locale-gen
Run that whenever you get the locales script to hang, which for us was about 4 times. Then accept all the error messages regarding package configuration issues, and continue. When the upgrade is complete, reboot your machine.
Now, after reboot you want to clean up any issues that remain with the locales generation, so simply run...
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
and if it doesn't get run you can then manually reconfigure with...
sudo dpkg --configure -a
We thought we now had a fully functional system. That wasn't too bad for an upgrade. A small, minor, bump in the road but no real white knuckle, stomach ulcer, hair pulling, keyboard banging moments like we are used to with such upgrades. A success!! .... or so we thought ....
The real bugger came when we went to play a DVD. We of course had our restricted extras installed from 7.10 and all that encompasses, yet we could no longer play DVDs. Checking that all the necessary components were there showed that, in fact, they were all still present and functional. But why couldn't we play DVDs then?
Oddly we also noticed that the DVD rom drive was now called '/dev/scd0'. SATA? Why is our IDE drive setup with SATA? HDPARM resulted as such, confirming that things were afoul:
=> mugen@mugen[11:51 AM]~:$ sudo hdparm /dev/scd0
/dev/scd0:
IO_support = 0 (default)
16-bit)
HDIO_GET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_KEEPSETTINGS failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Something was off for sure. So some looking around the interwebetry, we decided it was something with the loading of the IDE devices on loading of the kernel. The result? Modify our grub entry for the default kernel to include a generic IDE call as such:
Adjust /boot/grub/menu.lst to append 'all_generic_ide' after the default entry
title Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-21-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-21-generic root=UUID=31cf204e-e22c-4d3c-b4a2-1e0c4c5e227f ro quiet splash all_generic_ide
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-21-generic
quiet
After a reboot, throwing in our favorite DVD of a season of Dexter, all was golden. We could sit back and enjoy our newly upgraded system and watch some blood splatter, serial forensics in the glory of 8.04!
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