Upgrade Kubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10

Since a coming version of LinuxMCE will be based on Kubuntu 7.10 I started thinking about upgrade my home PC. I found this manual explained how to do an upgrade using a package manager. I played a bit with Kubuntu installed under VMware and couldn’t upgrade successful. Adopt manager crashed every time when the text of agreements should be displayed. GNOM update manager didn’t detect a new version. So, finally I have to try the manual upgrade from the command line (highly unrecommended by Ubuntu/Kubuntu developers).

Proxy definition for APT

Recently when I started to upgrade Kubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10 using Adopt manager I faced with problem. It doesn’t get proxy setting from the system. To solve that a following line should be added into file /etc/apt/apt.conf (you have to create it if it doesn’t exist):
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://user:password@proxy_URL:proxy_Port";
User name and password can be omitted if you don’t use them.

Meet Werewolf

Today I upgraded my work PC up to Fedora 8 (Werewolf). Unlike previous upgrades I tried to use yum. I run the procedure according to Upgrading Fedora Using Yum. It took about 3 – 4 hours and finished successfully. After rebooting I just install a plug-in to listen MP3
yum update alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
and patched VMWave to build vmnet on post 2.6.23 kernels. That’s it! Enjoying fast system 🙂

P. S. Another workaround. Any Java-based applications crashes with following error:
java: xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock' failed.
Hack which works for me is following:
sed -i 's/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g' /usr/java/jre1.6.0_01/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

Upgraded to WordPress 2.2

I upgraded Smart Home Blog to the latest version of WordPress 2.2. As usual the upgrade procedure is extremely easy. But there were a few troubles with that version.

1. Dashboard didn’t work properly. It gave a error
You don't have permission to access /wp-admin/index-extra.php on this server.
The solution is to create a file .htaccess in the directory wp-admin and add there following lines:
<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</IfModule>

2. I use excellent plugin Flickr Photo Album which allows to insert photos from Flickr into your posts. So, after upgrade the image upload form disappeared.

Solution: change the line 208 from wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/class-admin.php
if (!ereg(’^2.1′, get_bloginfo(’version’))) {

to

if (!ereg(’^2.2′, get_bloginfo(’version’))) {

3. Post preview area was removed. Instead of that the new link ‘Preview’ was added right after form controls. It opens the post in the new window. IMHO, this is not the best improvement in that version. Personally, I prefer the old preview functionality.

Back to OS 2005

Recently I decided to upgrade my Nokia 770 up to OS 2006. The procedure of upgrade is very simple. There is a Windows utility which make this procedure easily for Windows guys. But you can use flasher under Linux as well.
My first impression of OS 2006 is very positive. It looks much better than OS 2005. But the most significant change is an application installer. It works now similar to apt-get utility. So, it’ll be easy to update installed packages. Also, the application installer uses dependences for packages.
But after playing with the new OS I returned back to OS 2005. Because the OS 2006 has a new architecture – ARMEL and there is not way anymore to install Debian packages for ARM. Well, I’m going to work with OS 2005 till all packages needed for me (mainly related with SDL) will be ported to the ARMEL.