Ubuntu Upgrade From 9.04 To 9.10, Oops...

So I had been putting off upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. I did this because the Ubuntu 9.10 CD I had downloaded was not able to live boot on my PC. Now, my PC's getting pretty long in the tooth, so I just figured it was a problem related to the age of my PC, and that I'd do a bit of investigation into potential problems prior to performing the upgrade. Well, I never did much of that and ended up doing the upgrade anyways. Oops...

So I started the network upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 yesterday morning, and it finished and rebooted yesterday evening. Busybox timed out trying to finish booting the PC. It had "lost" the root harddrive. I rebooted to a Fedora 12 Live CD I had made just last week, and did some investigation on potential Grub problems after upgrading. First, I was still using Grub 1 rather than Grub 2, probably because one only gets Grub 2 installed if coming from a fresh installation. This is OK with me, I've also decided to stick with using ext3 file systems since test reports show significant performance hits with ext4. I ended up having to modify the root= parameter in grub's menu.lst file. This got the machine booting.

There were a couple other problems I ended up having to de-fang to get things running. First off, Networkmanager sure doesn't like static IP configrations (or it didn't allow me to edit the settings) so I removed it. Second, bind doesn't seem to by running as a caching name server so I had to put a nameserver line into resolv.conf. Third, lm_sensors was buggered up and I could not get the iy87 module to load. This was fixed by adding aan additional boot parameter acpi_enforce_resources=lax to the menu.lst file, and then running grub-update. I'm still ironing out bugs and moving things around, but it's running good now, better than 9.04 did (pulseaudio seems to run better). I'll report more progress later on.