Yesterday afternoon I kicked off the update to Karmic Koala (9.10) on my trusty Dell Latitude D820 laptop that was running Ubuntu 9.04. The update took a long time (mostly due to the servers getting hammered) and, overall, worked just fine.

I did have to struggle with a couple of things. For example, I originally installed that machine with Xubuntu a long time ago and then converted to GNome. The Karmic upgrade enabled Xubuntu as the default again and configured XFCE as the default session, but that’s easy enough to fix. I can’t seem to find where to change my logon screen to the one I was using, though.

The big issue issues I’m running on, however, are related to what I use my machine the most for :(:

  • I had to change some of my scripts for mounting Windows shares in other machines as specifying the rw option to mount was no longer working. No errors, just mounting read-only instead. To fix this, I had to add the file_mode=0777 and dir_mode=0777 options to the mount command. No big deal, but took me a few Google searches to figure it out.
  • Building C/C++ apps/libraries on a samba share doesn’t work anymore, as GCC will always fail with a “Value too large for the defined data type” error. I’m basically hitting the bug described in this bug report. I do hope it gets fixed soon, as otherwise I will have to get back to 9.04, which does work fine. Meanwhile, I’ll try setting up another VM with 9.04 to see if I can get some work done. Ouch!


Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.