Yesterday turned out to be a deluge of epic proportions. A moisture-saturated atmosphere dumped an unexpectedly large amount of water across the upper Gulf Coast. The Houston area had to deal with waves of hail, flooded freeways littered with floating and abandoned cars, high-water rescues, and general misery. What the local forecasters said on Friday would be a 10-30% chance of scattered showers became a 100% certainty of something floating in backyards everywhere.
So it was the perfect day to settle in with my visiting father-in-law as the girls swam around town and watch home-improvement shows on cable and perform an upgrade to by VirtualBox session of Ubuntu.
- Find in RSS feeds that my Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal install has a 13.04 Raring Ringtail upgrade available.
● Ubuntu 13.04 is ready to deploy - Ubuntu
● Ubuntu 13.04 boosts graphics performance to prepare for phones, tablets - Ars Technica
● Ubuntu 13:04 Raring Ringtail published: The most important features at a glance - Caschys Blog (GTranslated)
● New Ubuntu version hits today! - Boing Boing
● Ubuntu 13.04 'Raring Ringtail' gives some, takes some - BetaNews
● Hands-On With The New Features In Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail - AddictiveTips - Begin making plans to do an in-place upgrade of my VirtualBox Ubuntu build…forgetting I had recently updated VirtualBox to 4.2.12 and it didn’t hurt my Windows VM systems…so why should I care about Ubuntu impact.
● Downloads – Oracle VM
● Changelog – Oracle VM VirtualBox - Launched my VirtualBox Ubuntu build and logged in normally…and got a blank desktop. I did this several times. I could launch the VM and get the expected account login window for Ubuntu 12.10 just fine, but the desktop would never load. Hmmm. Wonder if that recent VirtualBox update had anything to do with it? Probably.
- Did some research and found some posts regarding VMWare upgrades screwing with Ubuntu in the past and they had tips about disabling 3D acceleration in the VM machine settings. VirtualBox has a similar feature (that was enabled) so I disabled it, relaunched the Ubuntu VM and now was able to load the desktop! Lesson learned; after upgrading VirtualBox, disable 3D acceleration on first-boot.
● Latest Ubuntu update broke cinnamon · Issue #1763 · linuxmint/Cinnamon - GitHub
● Later remember I also had 3D headaches last Ubuntu upgrade that I had to power-through. - At that point I was able to install/upgrade to the latest VirtualBox Extension pack within Ubuntu proper. It ran slow as molasses but got the job done. Shut down the VM when done, re-enabled 3D acceleration in the VM machine settings, and was able to log back into the Ubuntu desktop with no issues and it was super-fast again. Yea! Looks like my former fixes from that post are still sticking:
● Ubuntu 12.10 – VirtualBox Guest Additions not Working -Complete, Concrete, Concise
● #10901 (vboxvideo fails to auto-load on Ubuntu 12.10 Guest) – Oracle VM VirtualBox
● virtualbox.org • View topic - Ubuntu 12.10 "virtually" unusable
Edited “/etc/modules” file to include “vboxvideo” line as suggested above. Shut down.
● [ubuntu] newbie question on editing as root - Ubuntu Forums
Edited “/etc/modules” file to include “vboxvideo” line as suggested above. Shut down.
● [ubuntu] newbie question on editing as root - Ubuntu Forums - Used Daniel Benny Simanjuntak’s tip in the last Ubuntu post comments I did to run the following command from the terminal to start the upgrade process: Piece of Cake (and it wasn’t a lie)!
…through terminal one can upgrade as well using the command:
sudo do-release-upgrade -d - Let it run forever…do a few reboots…
- When it is all settled down, I log in and kick the tires a bit, and change the desktop to the snazzy Raring Ringtail image.
- Check “Upgrade to Raring Ringtail” off my to-do list.
I keep this particular Ubuntu build around mostly for working with the super-cool NFAT Xplico. However it is good for testing additional specialized software utilities and just trying to get more familiar with the Ubuntu environment in general.
This particular virtual HDD is just 8 GB so free space is a premium. I could expand it to at least 10 GB but HDD space on my laptop is at a premium so for now I’m trying to keep it thin.
After I got the upgrade done, I uninstalled some extra programs that had come in the default Ubuntu build to make room. I also ran through a few of the tips in this older Mike's Software Development Blog: Freeing hard disk space in Ubuntu Linux post. There may be more tips for freeing up space I haven’t found yet. I’m open for new tips and tricks!
Finally, the super awesome and brilliant Ubuntucat must be living here on the Gulf Coast as well as she has found a bunch of free time (homebound due to biblical-portioned rainstorms perhaps?) and is ripping out tons of posts on Ubuntu 13.04 over the last two days! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Ubuntucat!
- Installing Ubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat
- Installing software in Ubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat
- Tweaking Privacy Settings in Ubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat
- Installing proprietary drivers on Ubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat
- Pure Ubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat
- Pure Kubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat (see Kubuntu | Friendly Computing for more info on this build)
- Pure Xubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat (see Xubuntu for more info on this build)
- Pure Lubuntu 13.04 - Ubuntucat (see lubuntu | lightweight, fast, easier for more info on this build)
--Claus V.
0 comments:
Post a Comment