Ubuntu 8.10 Upgrade Finished

Well, the upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10 worked out although not smoothly. Throughout the download and upgrading process, the updater ran into a number of issues that in the end broke my desktop all together. I could get to the login screen but not any further, I simply ended up with a blank screen after logging in.

Frustrating.

So, I started digging around and I finally found a workaround in this post. It's in a post towards the bottom by Charles Curley. Here's essentially what I had to do:

1. Reboot and open up the shell/command promopt (CTRL+ALT+F2).
2. Install scrollkeeper, which removes rarian and parts of Gnome.
3. Purge all of scrollkeeper once step two finished.
4. Installed rarian-compat.
5. Install ubuntu-desktop.

That did it. I did a reboot and I'm back in business.

So, what's 8.10 like, you ask? Well, I've barely had time to check yet but one reason I upgraded to the beta before all the bugs were worked out was because I was curious how 8.10 would handle wireless CDMA USB modems, like the CDU-680. Well, I'm happy to report that it's working better. The software that comes with the unit still acts up but once the interface changer has been run, the network manager gives you an option to automatically connect to the CDMA connection. No need to configure GnomePPP or any other similar application. I was happy to see that. It will make it easier to use. At some point I'll have to see if I can get my cell phone to act as a modem too.

Next step: updating the laptop. I think I'll wait for the official release for that though.