Dapper

I decided to upgrade my work desktop PC to Ubuntu's Dapper Drake release over the weekend - left it going from an ssh login from home. I'd been meaning to do it for ages but work kept getting in the way, so I decided as I was around the flat for a few hours cleaning, why not just leave it running and do the large downloads over the weekend when it won't matter to the company.

Dapper Drake has been out since June, and having seen how many updates were still being made to fix problems, I had avoided it for a few weeks; but now it seemed stable enough and the teething problems looked like they'd mostly been ironed out.

I only had two problems post ugprade:

1. I couldn't log in graphically via the gnome (gdm) login screen.
   Ok, a pretty serious problem, but only the one.. ssh remote login or via the text virtual terminals (eg. via Ctrl+Alt+F1) worked just fine but it just behaved like I'd got the password wrong but without any errors or pause. I knew I could type it ok, so I did a google and checked the logs for the Xserver, syslog, and auth (in /var/log).
   I had this odd error:

   Execution of PostLogin script returned > 0. Aborting.

   It had been working fine before, and I'd completely forgotten Synergy had an entry in the script to restart it as the user after the as-root version on startup. I couldn't see why it would fail, unless some libraries had broken in the upgrade or been removed or changed configuration; but I disabled synergy and lo and behold, it worked! I could log in again. I tried rebuilding synergy before running it again, but it seemed to not need new binaries installing (from what I could catch of the speedily-flying-by build output).

2. My sudo sessions weren't being reset as they used to. This problem was due to a customisation I'd made to the last one involving /etc/sudoers and using fcron and sudo -k to manage my sudo session timeouts every day rather than the default-installed anacron (which clash according to the package dependencies). That was easily fixed once I realised it had removed fcron in favour of anacron again.

So now I have a fully working Dapper that looks just - well, dapper! (excuse the pun). No config appears broken yet, but it did mess with my window titlebar - the colours. It's got rounded edges, looks a little cuter.

Tags: ubuntu dapper linux upgrade