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comments: 0Or, using the distribution upgrade for Ubuntu to move from 7/10 to 8/4. I've tried on 2.5 machines so far. The full install, if you are using Ubuntu and have already downloaded the ~1GiB of package data, can still take around 45 minutes to an hour, and stopping halfway could seriously bork things beyond what a journeyman could repair.
But do not despair. Everything (except some translation file for Russian Blackjack; sorry Russia, you're off the island) upgrades fairly smoothly. However, no upgrade is without it's hiccups, and here are two that "got" me. The "got" means that I was mildly annoyed but knew how to fix them.
One was unique to my situation and probably not due to the Ubuntu upgrade per se, but was definitely something I've been seeing more under the heavier-on-the-memory 8/4 than 7/10, and that was a complete system lockup. Happened when I "did too much". I checked free a couple of times too many before I noticed that my swap wasn't there, but that's how it was. As I might have mentioned earlier, swap is good for computers.
The cause of this is almost certainly some dodgy partition swapping I did a month ago when I installed Windows XP on this computer to play Dreamfall. I had a 10GiB partition all set up for Windows + Game for a long time, but never bothered with the install (YAGNI). When I needed it, I realized (after a few runs of waiting 15 minutes for the Windows installer to load all of it's drivers) that I was trying to install to a logical partition and Windows doesn't appreciate it thank you very much. I had to shift around my swap and Windows partition to make the swap logical and the Windows primary before it would yield and install.
Ubuntu uses drive UUID's in the fstab (and in dev under /dev/disk/by-uuid/); these uuid's don't change as long as the partitions don't change (HEH) and they are also device dependent, so you can put your card reader on /media/cardreader/ and your ipod on /media/ipod even if both are going to be '/dev/sdb'. UUID's for devices are generally a good idea, especially since linux has a habit of switching disks (sdb? sda? who cares!) when their position on the bus switches (or just randomly, it seems). Some people don't understand, but they probably just don't like seeing a big ugly UUID in their fstab. They should get over it because for now it's the best solution if your system is going to be managed programatically. Anyway, I never even remade the swap partition, so after mkswapping it and turning it on, I added the new UUID for the partition into the fstab and presto changeo things are nice.
The other issue is with flash sound. 8/4 moved to the "pulse audio" sound server, which is a Good Thing. PulseAudio is like every other sound server in existence except that it's a lot better and it is easier to integrate via wrappers. One such wrapper is the "libflashsupport" wrapper distributed in 8/4 to wrap the non-free flash player's direct use of /dev/dsp (or alsa, i forget which) in calls to PulseAudio. For people who think that this is just "stupid and pointless", PulseAudio buys you lots of nifty things like program specific volume control and a far better backend architecture than esd or arts, and it would behoove people to finally solve playing a sound without fighting over /dev/ resources once and for all in Linux.
So, if your flash stuff isn't working, the first thing to do is check if libflashsupport is installed. If it is, then chances are pulseaudio is not working correctly on your system. If you didn't have problems before with sound, or just want your goddamn youtube, remove libflashsupport. If your flash stuff isn't working and you don't have libflashsupport, install it. Remember, if you want to not use pulseaudio to edit your /etc/firefox/firefoxrc to use 'aoss' as the audio backend for firefox.