I finally got around to upgrading my desktop from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04.
First of all, the bluetooth connection to my wireless Logitech keyboard broke. It’s always the first thing to break, so I did what I’ve done in the past: I repeated the “set up a new bluetooth device” steps about 30 times in a row, with minor variations, until it finally registered correctly. I may have rebooted once or twice along the way, I can’t remember now.
Second, my wired connection has been flaky, sometimes working and sometimes not. (Wireless has been fine, however.) Rebooting had fixed the problem until today. Eventually I found this thread which told me that I needed to not just reboot, but hard reboot: turn off my machine and disconnect it from all power sources for several minutes. Apparently this causes the network card’s firmware to be reloaded. Miraculously enough, this worked. Fingers crossed it’ll continue to work next time I reboot or restart.
Unfortunately, the machine’s speaker still doesn’t beep when someone pings me in Chatzilla. That stopped working when I upgraded to 9.10. Actually, the machine’s speaker stopped working at all after that upgrade, so I investigated and modified some config file so that it worked again with the ‘beep’ command, but it still didn’t work in Chatzilla. It’s the one time when I’d like any kind of sound to work in Linux (I can use my Mac laptop for watching videos and all that stuff).
Having used Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and now 10.04, I’m glad 10.04 is an LTS release. It’ll be good not having to go through these steps every 6 months.
3 replies on “Upgrading Ubuntu (sigh)”
Have they fixed the thing where stuff in an LTS release becomes horribly out of date after just a few months? (Note: I only use Ubuntu in VMs.)
What sort of internal speaker do you have? Is it real one or is it on the sound card, if it’s on the sound card you should check your alsa mixer settings (something like alsamixer -c0 to make sure you’re looking at the actual sound card and not pulseaudio’s virtual device)
Also you seem to have gotten really really unlucky on your hardware set… what have you got a sony laptop or something? (probably not a sony since then your wireless probably wouldn’t work at all…)
Spudd86: I think it’s a real PC speaker. I deduce this because the machine has a sound card, from which I have never managed to obtain a single sound 🙁 But I only use it for development so the lack of sound card never worried me that much. The PC speaker beep in Chatzilla is the only sound I’d really like to have.
As for the hardware itself, it’s a desktop machine built from parts. I don’t think any of the components are very unusual.