.:.

Another Ubuntu upgrade, another critical upgrade bug. I had this idea that letting a solid chunk of time go by before upgrading (in this case, ~4 months) would mean most of the upgrade bugs would be gone. Instead, I was bit in the ass because using the current 7.10 Gutsy kernel (2.6.22-15) means the upgrade process will freeze on the locales package.

The workaround, found by siberoptik on the Ubuntu forums, is to reboot your system with the 2.6.22-14 kernel. Everything is peachy after that. Since I’m working remotely, the way I changed kernels was to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and nuke the lines about the 2.6.22-15 kernel. That made 2.6.22-14 the top-most kernel. By the end of the upgrade none of those kernels will matter anymore anyway. If you are in front of the box, you can just press <Esc> at the grub menu.

If you find yourself in the middle of an upgrade, frozen at “Generating locales…”, all is not lost. Get another shell on the system, look for the process tree (`ps axfw`) with locale-gen running, and kill locale-gen off.¹ For me, the upgrade continued on until the only packages left were ubuntu-minimal and locales. I had to kill off the locale-gen process a couple of more times until the upgrade process was declared “failed”.

At this point I reboot the box and something went awry as it didn’t come back again. It’s unclear from the logs what exactly happened (I was working remotely so couldn’t watch the screen), but after a hard reset I was able to get back in again. Running `dpkg --configure -a` had the locales generate instantly and everything was fine.

The total joke about all of this is, as usual, it’s not documented on Ubuntu’s site in any useful place. Yes, I found it in the forum after I hit the bug and knew what to search for, but it’s a bit late at that point. You’d think there would be a “caveats” or “known problems” or “big nasty critical bugs you should avoid” section on the help page about Hardy upgrades.

In an effort to prevent others from going down this road, I’ve put information in the following places:

• Added a “Known problems” section to the HardyUpgrades help page.
• Added a comment to the update-manager fails 7.10 -> 8.04 LTS question.
• Opened a bug against the update-manager package.

Update (2008.08.19): The bug I filed against update-manager as been made a duplicate of a bug in linux-source-2.6.22. A lot of talk has been happening there and someone claims the developers are working on a fix.

1. IMHO, it’s a good idea to try killing the highest process in the tree and work your way down to the root until you get the result you want. [↩]

Good basketball has me out of my seat waving, whooping, and worrying; wonderful emotions that come out during the NBA Playoffs. My neighbors must love me. Here’s a little audio excerpt of a great moment. I love it when the announcers are having just as good a time.

Step right up and get your Zabbix 1.4.4 packages for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)! Packages are available for i386 and amd64 architectures (sorry, I don’t have a powerpc machine). To get them via apt add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:¹

deb http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main
deb-src http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main

You can also download them manually.

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1. You may want to download the package signing key and add it with apt-key. [↩]

Over the last few years I’ve purchased music online from a variety of sites. Aside from wanting files that sound good, a hard requirement is songs must be DRM-free. Yep, that mostly means the iTunes store is out.¹

My favorite place to buy/download music is bleep.com. There are two reasons:

1. very high quality, DRM-free tracks
2. an awesome music preview system

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1. I did buy one DRM-free track via iTunes when iTunes-plus launched (as a vote of support), but I have yet to find any other iTunes-plus tracks I’m interested in. Seriously, every time I look for an album it’s only available wrapped in iTunes’ DRM. With the advent of amazonmp3.com, I’m probably going to stop checking the iTunes store at all. More on that later. [↩]

My friend Matt and I have shared a number of stories regarding our frustrations with reporting bugs to Ubuntu. He recently wrote an overview of his experiences — Why I’ve stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu — which was linked to by OSNews. The comments there are mostly level and reasonable, but some people are missing the focus of his statement. He’s not whining “fix my bug!”, he’s drawing attention to the methodology used to process bugs.

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