And as per the usual, I updated a little early. Not quite at beta this time; I managed to subdue the upgrade itch until a few days before the final release. The only justification I needed beyond that was that the mirrors always get raped come release day.

So I set about upgrading to the release candidate version (Alt+F2, and run ‘update-manager –devel-release’) of Hardy and let it do its thing. I had a small issue with /boot being full of old kernels, which just required a few ‘sudo rm -r’ commands from a terminal, but nothing big.

However, I did encounter a few issues…

The first of which, was the Nvidia binary driver that I had installed for reasons of graphical goodness, but of course it wasn’t the maintained package, therefore the upgrade tool did nothing with it and I was stuck with X’s safe graphics mode. Neat, but genuinely annoying.

To make matters worse (and this one just wasn’t my fault) I was also stuck without any sudo access at all!

teh@snatch:~$ sudo su -
sudo: can't resolve hostname snatch.
teh@snatch:~$


Of course, if I checked out my /etc/hosts file, it looked like this:

teh@snatch:~$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 teh-desktop


Now I knew that was wrong (line #2 is a strange left-over from the default installation) but of course I couldn’t use sudo to elevate my privileges in order to change it! Frustration!

One live CD later, and I managed to alter the offending ‘teh-desktop’ line to read ’127.0.0.1 snatch’ instead. Job done, and it works fine now.

The question is: why the hell does the /etc/hosts file matter? Curiously, I don’t know, but maybe someone will be willing to give a better explanation.

I left the Hardy upgrade on my home machine until a few days after the final release, due to a mortal fear of the upgrade tool nobbling dmraid and causing ‘unable to mount roof vfs’ kernel panics, but thankfully it worked without a hitch (more-so than my work PC, in fact – though it goes without saying that I checked /etc/hosts first! )

And now that I’ve been using it a little while, I’m quite impressed. There’s a few nice polishes here and there – to compiz-settings in particular. I can now use edges in expose!

However I’m a little baffled as to the whereabouts of my ‘New Tab’ button in Firefox 3b5. It’s there in the Windows installations I have, so why have they deemed it necessary to exclude it from the Ubuntu release? Well.. At least they have an RC and a final release to go yet, so hopefully this will be fixed.