Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

Boon (the desktop) is running Fedora 9, which is out of date. Ubuntu has been running nicely on the Thinkpad for some time, so I´d like to upgrade to that.

The first step is to take a look at the disk space for a place to put it. Luckily, I´ve got an old unused /boot partition, so I can use that. I’ve learned from past mistakes that sharing a boot partition between different distributions is a mistake. Thinking they’re upgrading, they tend to uninstall older kernels still being used.

I have Logical Volume Management installed to take advantage of flexible partitioning and drive striping. There’s enough space on the LVM for the new install, so that’s no problem.

I grabbed the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop ISO from Ubuntu.com and burned the CD. After booting the install disk, the installation can’t see the LVM. A quick check on-line turns up the problem. In order to use LVM, you need either the Alternate or Server install disks, which don’t have an install GUI. I burned the Alternate disk and started the install. I chose Ext4 journaling file systems for /, /boot, and /home and put Grub on the /boot partition /dev/sda3. Unfortunately, this isn’t the boot device for the drive, so I can’t run anything other than my old installations. I boot into the old Fedora installation and see where Grub was installed and update it. I hit another snag. Fedora 9 can’t read Ext4. Plan B is to boot the Ubuntu disc and run the rescue feature. This gives you a root prompt. I chose the new installation’s root as the root of my rescue session and manually mounted /boot. I ran grub-install /dev/sda (the current location of the boot loader) and rebooted.

Now I’ve got a running Ubuntu system and can boot the old Fedora 9 installation, too. The first log in takes a half minute to bring up my desktop. This is the same problem I had on the Thinkpad, so I know it’ll be fixed when the updates are applied. Soon the Update Manager pops up and does its thing. Problem solved.

Things I needed to install that didn’t come out of the box:
gkrellm for system monitor
emacs for text editing
startupmanager to edit Grub 2 configuration
gnucash for budgeting and banking
flashplugin-installer for Shockwave Flash plugin for Firefox

Although it’s horribly out of date, I’m running Fedora 8 on my backup server, Mothball. Since the DVD burner on my desktop machine, Boon, has flaked out and eats discs rather than burning them, I’ve been using the burner on Mothball. (BTW, never buy a refurbished computer. It’s nothing but hassle.)

The UDev rules on Mothball cause the DVDRW drive (/dev/sr1) to get permissions only writeable by root. This is how to fix that:

Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules
Change the line:
SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr[0-9]*", SYMLINK+="scd%n"
to
SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr[0-9]*", SYMLINK+="scd%n", MODE="0664"

udevtest /dev/sr1 can be used for testing your rules.
udevcontrol reload_rules will supposedly reload them, but my permissions didn’t change until I rebooted.