If you have even a small modicum of knowledge in IT you know the first rule of change management is “Before you do anything make sure you have a good backup”.

Well I’ve been using Ubuntu 9.04 since it’s release and today the update manager gave me the option to upgrade to the latest release which is 9.10. So I clicked upgrade. No backup at all…

Despite knowing one should always have a good backup handy Sometimes we take dumb risks.

Anyway it took about 5hrs on a 7000kbps connection and was successful. Phewww!

My Ubuntu 9.04 install had XFCE, lxde and _alot_ of cruft so the download was for over 1700 packages…

I found recently that because of the new ext3 to ext4 filesystem upgrade that my trusty old Knoppix 5.11 CD (I’m not a fan of the newer 6.x series) can’t mount some of the Ubuntu installed volumes… So if things did go pear shaped then I would have to find a very recent Linux rescue CD in order to address the ext4 volumes.

Problem 1:
Last night I shut down my computer to try and be a bit energy conscious. This morning I booted it and got to a flashing “login:” prompt. It was flashing multiple times a second. Pressing a key to enter a username only selected a letter every 3rd or 4th attempt making entry of a password impossible.

Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL and rebooting into recovery mode and running X -configure showed that I didn’t even have an intel driver installed which seemed a bit strange seeing as I have an Intel Video card.

So to attempt a fix I went into netroot recovery mode and ran:

apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel

And rebooted. Seems to have worked. Because I am now back in a GUI session typing this.