[wellylug] Flash for Firefox

Jim Cheetham jim at gonzul.net
Tue Sep 11 20:36:27 NZST 2007


On 11/09/2007, Persian <veganforlife at clear.net.nz> wrote:
> I am writing this from my removeable back up hard drive as the upgrade completely
> destroyed my system. I have heaps of error msgs on paper that I need to type
> out tomorrow. The X server fails to start, there is no core keyboard, fatal
> server error, failed to initiate core devices.

Well, by the sounds of it, even knowing what the errors are, you won't
be able to avoid them. Go for a new install from a current OS I guess
:-( At least you had a go.

> I dont have a snowballs chance in hell of doing that and I do not even wonder
> why people have windoze really.

:-) Well, Windows doesn't even pretend to upgrade. It just overwrites,
and that will almost always go wrong unless you do a complete
reinstall anyway (i.e. format c:, then install). But most people only
ever buy a new computer in order to get a new Windows, so it's not a
completely fair comparison.

> I just dont understand why it isn't possible to upgrade Ubuntu from one ver
> to the next using the upgrade button. Must be a damn good reason I guess!

Well, 5.04 is "unsupported". However, the upgrade path "should" work
regardless of that, as it was supported at the time. But in your case
it obviously hasn't, which is a shame.

Distribution version upgrades are very difficult to do, because at
some point the upgrade management program needs to upgrade the
underlying C libraries, as well as itself - and often it needs to do
that *before* it has finished the upgrade, because it needs some new
facilities in order to complete the upgrade! And that's just with one
library to consider - aptitude itself uses 11 libraries ...

$ ldd /usr/bin/aptitude
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xbfffe000)
        libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.3.11 =>
/usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.3.11 (0xb7f1f000)
        libncursesw.so.5 => /lib/libncursesw.so.5 (0xb7ed5000)
        libsigc-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libsigc-2.0.so.0 (0xb7ecf000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7e7e000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7da9000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xb7d88000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7d7e000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7c66000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7c62000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fc3000)

However, that's all excuses really. I suspect that the root cause of
the problem is that the 5.04 update didn't actually work properly,
even though it looked ok. However that'll be difficult to prove. :-(

-jim




More information about the wellylug mailing list