The other night, sort of kind of on a whim, but not really, I upgraded my main machine from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10. There were some problems, but in the end, not very serious. No need for panic.

I’d upgraded my laptop when 7.10 was released, and that went fine. The plan for my other machines is to keep current, but to wait until the end of the six month release cycles, hoping that things will be more stable by then. After realizing that 8.04 will be coming out before long, I decided to upgrade my system76 box over the weekend, and that went pretty well. (My second upgrade on that one: 6.10 » 7.04 » 7.10.)

I was more apprehensive about upgrading Zodiac, however, since I’ve installed so much more stuff and there would be more opportunities for things to break. This would be my first OS upgrade on my primary machine since switching full-time to GNU/Linux back in June 2007. On Tuesday I just decided to go for it, without doing anything to prepare up front. (The same plan I had used for my other upgrades.)

The install process went very smoothly, and much the same as it had for the other machines. There were occasional prompts to keep or replace various config files, but for the most part everything hummed along. And then finally, a restart, and as text started scrolling up…

An error related to the VirtualBox driver, and…

Some error, something like: “Can’t display this video mode,” with the GUI not starting up and the screen flashing between text and blank screen. Oh, crap. I had a sinking feeling, but I tried to remain calm. I got in to recovery mode from the GRUB menu, and then I remembered from previous experience that deleting xorg.conf will usually get you back to some kind of usable GUI mode. (Backing it up first, of course!) I did that and got in to X, which was reassuring: Things probably weren’t that hosed.

And then I realized why I was being punished: I had installed the proprietary nvidia display drivers in order to get my dual monitors working with less fuss last summer when I made the big switch. That had to be it. From there it didn’t take long to reinstall and get dual monitors back after some fiddling and finally restoring an old xorg.conf file. (Yeah, yeah, I’ll eventually work on free video drivers also.) I was impressed with how well the nvidia installer works. It lets me be a dummy about that whole part of the system.

Other than that, the upgrade was pleasantly uneventful, with just a few minor wrinkles. Phew! Should be good to go for another six months.