Despite running into issues from time to time, I am a big fan of Ubuntu Linux!

I started out with Ubuntu version 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and made my way up to Hardy Heron (8.04). Then I stuck with Hardy Heron until after Intrepid Ibex (8.10) and Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) were released. Hardy Heron was a LTS (long term support) release and I liked that it was so stable.

Then Ubuntu Karmic Koala was released on Oct 29, 2009 and I decided it was time to upgrade.

Since Hardy Heron was a LTS edition, Ubuntu’s update manager never notified me when Intrepid Ibex or Jaunty Jackalope was released, and it also would not have done so for Karmic Koala. So I had to force the update manager to give me the update option.

I did this by pressing Alt-F2 and entering:

update-manager -d

Then the update button appeared in the update manager and the process could begin…

Upgrading

You cannot upgrade directly from Hardy Heron to Karmic Koala, but have to go through the versions between the two. The first upgrade was from Hardy Heron to Intrepid Ibex, and that went off without a hitch!

Part 2 of the upgrade was from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope. The upgrade itself went off fine, but when I started up Jaunty, I could not get the networking going! I needed to get connected to the internet because without that, the next part of the upgrade would be impossible!

Since I wasn’t planning to be a Jaunty user for very long, I didn’t really want to spend too much time trying to solve the network connection issue. So I simply booted into the previous version of the Linux kernel that was installed with Intrepid (2.6.27) and the networking was fine.

I could now do part 3 of the upgrade, which was upgrading from Jaunty Jackalope to Karmic Koala. The upgrade itself went fine, but then the fun started…

Problems

When I tried to boot into Karmic and the Caps Lock light started flashing and I had a blank screen, that was a sure sign that something was wrong! My laptop was locked up hard, and from what I could see, my only choice out of there was via the power button.

Since I had success with booting into version 2.6.27 of the kernel, I gave that another shot. That worked… sort of… The GUI started up, but then crashed after a few seconds and threw me out to the command prompt.

Long story short, and many frustrations in between, I figured out that either Karmic or Karmic’s version of the kernel, 2.6.31, did not like the proprietary driver (fglrx) of my ATI video card.

Then I found this great article on how to remove the fglrx proprietary ATI driver and instead use the open source driver. After this, the Karmic GUI started up.

In the process I uninstalled Compiz / Emerald that I had running under Hardy Heron. I’m assuming that the uninstall process did not restore the default windows manager settings. With no windows manager starting up, none of the windows I opened had a border or title bar, and the windows were unmovably attached to the top lefthand side of the screen.

The solution, I figured out, was to make sure that the metacity windows manager was starting up.

I did this by doing the following two steps:

1. Pressed Alt-F2 and entered gconf-editor in the box. Then I navigated to desktop->gnome->applications->windows-manager and entered /usr/bin/metacity for the current and default keys.
2. On the desktop menu I went to System->Preferences->Startup Applications and added an entry for metacity to start up during startup as well.

These two steps did the trick for me.

At this point, everything seems to be fine and I am really enjoying Ubuntu Karmic Koala!