So, as soon as I read of the Ubuntu 8.04 release I decided that would be a weekend activity. As always in these cases, I read the provided tid-bits, crossed my fingers and clicked through the “oks  Well, things did not go exactly as smoothly as I had hoped, but fortunately with just a little bit of additional work I think that I have gotten things back on track. I don’t know exactly what, but something went wrong. After walking away at the beginning of the update, I returned to my computer to see strange things. Most obvious strange thing was that the update manager was no longer running and there were no related windows about the update on screen – not the typical friendly Ubuntu update. Obviously I knew something was amiss, so I tried to run update manager again. Worst yet, this time after the update failed it returned to bash. hmmm…
‘gdm’…
login window… attempt to log in…
cream colored screen and nothing more… no hard drive activity… no nothing.
and so entered the sinking feeling 🙂
So I try to check out aptitude and get a message about dpkg problems and notified that I need to configure my dpkg packages…. Back to bash, head over to logs and check out dpkg.log and am still clueless. All I can see is the initial upgrade crapped out on configuring “ca-certificates  so back to shell and run ‘sudo dpkg –configure -a’, which configures all unpacked and unconfigured packages, and wait… and wait…. and wait some more… Apparently in my case my dpkg data was destroyed in the upgrade because it configured what I can only assume what was the majority of the packages installed on my machine. Once that was done, I was able to boot back into my Gnome desktop. I opened up the update manager for round two, but it now appears that I am hanging out in Hardy Heron.
Although the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as one would hope in an ideal world, it damn sure wasn’t the worst one would imagine in the less than ideal, so I will take it. Glad to be up and running with what thus far appears to be at least as good as before… now to go play in Hardy!
Side note: Logged in for this post and had some error about wp_comments being corrupted in my wordpress database… just my lucky day for corrupted databased… luckily for me it was fixed with a quick Google search and “REPAIR TABLE wp_comments”!