Chunhao's Blog

Upgrading is evil.

Although sometimes software need upgrading, in order to fix bugs, or add new supporting, when you find bugs, there are only two things you can do for it. The first is fixing it yourself, while the second is waiting for upgrade. On the other hand, you might find some bugs appears after you upgrading a software, which worked well before. It’s hard to tell why we are willing to upgrade it. Just for upgrading?

Almost 5 months have passed since Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” had released. And even “Intrepid Ibex” is coming within one month. I, should like changing, still used “Gutsy” in my laptop. There are several reasons why I keep using it. It’s hard to make all parts of my laptop Dell 1420 work well under Ubuntu 7.10, including the sound card, wireless, and microphone. Thank Dell Ubuntu Wiki a lot to provide patches to fix these issues. About 5 months ago, when “Hardy” was just released, the entry “Known Issues” in Dell Ubuntu Wiki is empty. I cannot put myself in hell to try the new release. Fortunately, issues have be found and fixed now for “Hardy”. I can upgrade my system safely–at least in image.

Another thing is that I have patched something on the kernel, such as VBox. I don’t want to repatch them after upgrading. And I was afraid that some software may don’t work after upgrading to “Hardy”. I have no time and don’t want to reinstall and reconfig them. Maybe a small issue can cause the damage of entire system. Then, I have to reinstall everything, and encounter all kinds of problems. A good thing is that I have my /home located in a separate partition. If my system is down, at least I can retain the things under my home folder, which are very very important.

I have one thousand reasons for not upgrading. However, how could you image that the software you are about to install depend on a newer version of “libglib” or “libc6″? Pidgin 2.5 support off-line messages for MSN, which I desired for a long time. When I tried to install it, it told me that it need a newer version of “libglib”. That meant I have to upgrade almost everything. Sounds like hell. Finally, I decided to do upgrade for Ubuntu.

The whole process took me an afternoon. I followed the official guide. It was not very hard. After downloading everything, dialogues popped up one after another. After I handled all of them, upgrading is over. The following thing is following the Dell Ubuntu Wiki to fix issues. At last, everything seems work fine, including microphone.

The last thing is installing Pidgin 2.5, for which, seems, the whole upgrading is processing.