With the upcoming release of Breezy and the availability of RC1, I thought it was time for doing an upgrade. I modified my sources.list, changed every instance of "hoary" to "breezy", followed by an "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade"... and there we go!
In the progress of downloading and installing, I realized again how powerful APT really is... I was upgrading my system to a whole new release version, while I continued listening to my music, browsing the web, hanging around on IRC, etc. After a while, I noticed Konqueror couldn't surf the web anymore, due to a communication problem with kio_http, but what would you expect?
The upgrade went smooth, except for some dependency problem with mozilla-firefox and the firefox package, but that was easily fixed by uninstalling one, and install the other... Then it was time for a reboot, so I could run the newest kernel... Ow, I also added kubuntu-default-settings and kubuntu-desktop to the install list, to make sure I had all newest stuff installed, like usplash.
Booting went fine, except that usplash didn't seem to work... I also had troubles getting my network up. My desktop connected wireless to my router, and there seemed a problem with my ndiswrapper config (I'm using a Linksys USB dongle). Ok, maybe I was looking for trouble with this setup ;-)
To solve the networking problem, I first tried to update the ndiswrapper kernel module (although it's there by default, but I thought it was causing the troubles). Therefore I first had to download the package on another machine of course. After compilation, it seemed my fresh kernel module was compiled with GCC 4.0, while the kernel was compiled with GCC 3.4... ok, I changed my /usr/bin/gcc link to point to the right gcc version, and tried again... No luck! Dmesg output told me it loaded the ndiswrapper driver, but it didn't seem to detect the hardware (although ndiswrapper -l showed the driver was installed and the hardware was present), but the kernel didn't give me the required wlan0 interface! In the end, I removed the Windows driver using "ndiswrapper -e rt2500usb" and I reinstalled it with "ndiswrapper -i /path/to/rt2500usb.inf". This time, things started to work! :-))
I don't know what the problem was, and why I had to reinstall the Windows driver, because it was already installed in /etc/ndiswrapper/... but it fixed my problem. I'm sure if I had use proper hardware which has native Linux drivers, I wouldn't have had this problem, but oh well, I'm glad if I can learn something new.
Running Breezy for half a day now... it seems pretty stable. I also upgraded to KDE 3.5 beta (yeah, I love living on the edge), which seems pretty stable too! Actually, I didn't have a single crash yet... The only "problem" I have, is that my "Terminal Sessions" menu item disappeared from the K-menu for some reason, while it's still checked in the panel properties. Disabling and re-enabling didn't fix the problem, so maybe I should report this as a bug. Last night I also had some trouble with loosing my network connectivity, but this problem seems to have vanished...
Meanwhile, I'm also downloading OpenSUSE 10.0, since I may give it a try on my laptop... I'll see...
