I thought that updating Linux Ubuntu would be quick and easy, but in the end it took me more than a week. After the switch from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 I was stuck with a system that could start and sometimes did let me log in, but only to display the dashboard for a few seconds before showing a ‘loading Ubuntu’ grafic again. Apparently Ubuntu tried to start or restart but it never came out of this loop.
I must admit that I had not anticipated a problem like this so I had to reconsider what to do next. After trying for a day or two in the recovery mode to try to solve the problem I felt that I had to give up in order to move forward. Reluctantly I had to log in to Windows again after not using it for almost a year. So the ever-so-slow Windows had to update a lot as well as the anti-virus system, firefox etc. But after that I was able to browse and download a program that made it possible to access the linux partition to save my data. The windows partition wasn’t big enough unfortunately so I had to create some space once in a while before being able to transfer all files.
I reinstalled 9.04 from the live cd but for some reason I couldn’t install the Adobe flash player.
As I didn’t like having to return to 9.04 without knowing if I could upgrade to 9.10 in the future, and since I had to make a clean install anyway, I decided to try another Linux distribution that perhaps could give me a similar version as Ubuntu 9.10. OpenSuse seemed to be an option or Fedora. Both were about to be upgraded to a newer version within a week or two, but I didn’t want to wait for that and have to rebuild my Ubuntu system for those two weeks. Somewhere I read that Fedora might work better with some hardware so I tried to find out how to install Fedora as there seemed to be 5 cd’s needed for an install. I had however Fedora 9 on a live cd so I installed that, updated all and from within the system upgraded to Fedora 10. That didn’t work however as the computer never managed to go through the entire upgrade cycle of Fedora 10. So I burned a Fedora 11 live cd and installed that and to my joy that worked well, Flash could be activated and it runs perfectly.
Actually, for some reason Fedora is the most quiet Operating System I tried so far. There is an enormous difference in noise coming from the computer when running Windows or Fedora, the first being practically constantly irritating noisy and the latter being almost completely silent.
Fedora also offers and installs the latest software, including beta versions where as Ubuntu can be many versions behind.
Fedora 12, the latest version, will be released in a week or so. I will wait a few weeks before updating I suppose and then hope for the best.
And I am not sure if I dare to update my Notebook from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10.
Update 29-11-2009: It was unfortunately also not possible to install Fedora 12. As far as I can find out it has to do with the boot-memory being to small. This might be the problem for both Ubuntu and Fedora. Anyway, I gave up. For now I’ll run Fedora 11 until the next versions of Fedora or Ubuntu will be released, because who knows….
But the good news is that my Notebook did update without a problem to Ubuntu 9.10!
