phenorbitalBlog of a graduate working in banking IT in London.

Hardy HeronFiled Under: Technology

So, this week the new version of Ubuntu (and therefore Kubuntu) was released; version 8.04 LTS - aka Hardy Heron (and a variety of other names…). As a result I decided this weekend to update my desktop (previously running Gutsy Gibbon) to this using the update manager.

Previous updates haven’t gone so well, and last time the update manager crashed out during the upgrade; leaving in place some stuff that caused my machine not to boot until I managed to track down the cause and uninstall it from a maintenance prompt. This time, however, things seemed better and the upgrade went without a hitch… until I rebooted.

It was at this time that I discovered that no longer were my drives appearing as /dev/hd<foo><bar>, but as /dev/sd<baz><gaz>. This wouldn’t have been a problem, had I been using my drives by uuid in /etc/fstab. I wasn’t, and this is probably my fault as they were updated during the edgy upgrade but I changed the file and got rid of them somewhere between edgy and feisty.

So, after some jiggery pokery I got that problem solved and my machine was back up and booting, although I can’t seem to find my DVD drive anywhere in /dev, and a post on the ubuntu forums suggests that some drives might not be compatible with things (who wants to bet that mine is one of them).

This aside I’ve not had any problems so far. I’m still running KDE3, so can’t comment on the KDE4 variant, and haven’t played around with the desktop effects stuff. One thing that I did notice, however, was the decision to ship with Firefox 3 beta 5 by default, which most of the plugins I use don’t support. This was soon fixed by reinstalling Firefox 2 and manually updating the symlink in /usr/bin (as for some reason it doesn’t use /etc/alternatives unlike a lot of other applications).

All in all this has gone pretty smoothly… although it could have been better, and I would like my DVD drive to work at some point (although I only really used it for watching films, which I can do on the xbox instead now)

Tags: gutsy gibbon, hardy heron, kubuntu, linux, upgrade

Dilbert.comFiled Under: Rants

Congratulations to the guys responsible for the redesign of Dilbert.com, not only does it now take forever to load with the mass of flash and other nonsense that has been dumped on it, but the comic doesn’t display (using either Firefox or Opera on Linux with the latest flashplayer). It somewhat defeats the point of a comic site and this whole thing looks like the idea of some sort of PHB, so I wonder if the irony will be apparent to them.

Tags: broken, dilbert.com, fail, flash, web2.0