Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” upgrade notes

As experienced computer users know, the fresh-released versions of products are typically not very stable and reliable. It takes a few months (Typically until the x.1 version is released) for the product to really stabilize and become production-ready. This also seems to be true for Free and Open-Source software, though the maturing rate seems to be faster.

Knowing that, I typically wait a couple of months after an Ubuntu release before I take the time to upgrade. When it comes to Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, a further reason not to upgrade was provided by the fact that up until now it didn’t include a stable version of Firefox.

I finally decided to take the time and upgrade the Ubuntu version on my personal home computer yesterday. The upgrade didn’t went as smoothly as I hoped it would. Most of the issues can be blamed on the manual tweaks I’ve made to my system. Not all, however.

Below is a list of the issues I’ve encountered during and after the upgrade, and the solutions I came up with (when applicable).

Anime and Debian

Every once in a while, looking though my blog stats, I find some very weird searches hitting my blog, of the kind I cannot ignore (And therefore strive to ensure they keep hitting my blog), Today I found just such a search: “anime debian”.

Anime and Debian, hmm… unless I am failing to see a different meaning for the word Debian, this is indeed a weird combination, I can’t possibly think what the person who conducted the search expected it to yield.

It does ring a certain bell, I did remember seeing a picture of Debian-tan once, which is part if the “Linux-tan” series of characters, which is an attempt at a Linux-based response to the OS-tans.

DHCP Trouble on Debian

Here is one annoying little problem with Debian I do believe should have gone away years ago.

I’ve just finished installing a new machine on my home network with Debian 4.0, since I use “dnsmasq” as a combined DNS/DHCP server on my network, the installation had no trouble using DHCP to pull an address for my new machine, however, following the installation I tried connecting to the new machine from another machine using it’s hostname, since dnsmasq is configured to automatically register its DHCP clients in DNS this should have just worked, alas, it didn’t.