Ubuntu Linux: from Dapper to Edgy

• I had some trouble upgrading my desktop as I had the opera browser package installed (not supported by Ubuntu). Ubuntu wanted to change some directory into a symlink, but an Opera file was in the way. Solution: uninstall opera before you start upgrading (and install it again later if you want):

    dpkg --remove opera
  

• I had previously installed firefox-dom-inspector. Somehow the upgrade didn't go so well for that part. In Firefox, in the Extra-Addons menu item, the Dom Inspector was listed as broken. Reinstalling it solved the problem:

    aptitude reinstall firefox-dom-inspector
  

• The fonts in my Emacs editor looked a bit ugly or in the case of my laptop they were simply boxes instead of characters. The cause is that fonts were moved to a different location. So you have to manually edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and change lines like:

    FontPath  /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc
    into:
    FontPath  /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc
  

Those were the three problems I had. For the rest it went smooth as always. And it all seems to work just fine. Kudos to the Ubuntu community!

Oh, of course when you have compiled and installed some programs yourself, you may need to do that again. For instance I needed to reinstall some Zope versions, as the standard Ubuntu python version has been updated to 2.4.4. This version is not expected by e.g. Zope 2.9.5; it wants 2.4.2 or 2.4.3. This should not be a problem I guess, but it does mean that you need to do:

    ./configure --with-python=/usr/bin/python

That makes the configure script accept your python version. Then I tried to make Zope, but this gave lots of errors. This was solved by installing some development packages:

    aptitude install build-essential