[Wolves] Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy upgrade weirdness

[Andy Wootton]

Like several others, my upgrade was something of an adventure. I'm 
usually a LInux GUI and hence synaptic man so when I was left without 
Gnome I was a little lost for a while. I'd tried the upgrade from the 
command line: apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and everything seemed 
fine until I rebooted (that was a couple of weeks ago.)

The only obvious problem was that there seemed to be one dependency 
problem with an English-GB component of OpenOffice.org. 'Obviously' this 
couldn't have killed Gnome. A master package about GB English was trying 
to over-ride something that had been installed by OOo's spreadsheet. I 
eventually removed the problem by removing the master package. To my 
amazement the system then continued with the upgrade, upgrading more 
software in a list pages long. Gnome now worked! I went into Synaptic 
and there were loads more updates available that apt-get hadn't found. 
My confidence in Ubuntu's upgrade procedure was slightly shaken.

Then I realised how foolhardy I'd been. In my old life as a VMS system 
manager I wouldn't have dared do an OS upgrade on the fly like that and 
we were probably only dealing with 10 packages besides the OS. I'd have 
sent days manually working out the version dependencies by hand then 
copied the system disk to a spare device and upgraded the copy. Ubuntu 
has made my previous upgrades so simple that I've grown complacent. Just 
because it looks simple doesn't mean that it is. I hope I've learned a 
lesson from this experience.