Ubuntu Upgrade - The Aftermath

Well, as mentioned above, I forgot to grab a list of custom repos, but that was about the only thing of note in what I can honest describe was the smoothest upgrade I've ever done. More so than some of the in-place ones I've done too, which I'm pretty impressed with. There were a few things that I had to tweak, but these were down to how I've got my system setup, and I doubt they'll affect the majority of people. (I needed to copy the grub bootsector twice -- I presume an update went through in my first batch of updates -- and the usual tomfoolery to get ATI's graphics manager to work how I want with my two screens, but again this is far improved vs Karmic.)

Re-installing my packages was smooth too. I ran diff on the two lists of manually installed files, and then just looked down the list for those I wanted to bring back. Despite this I'm wishing that apt allowed you to add packages of the list of those to be installed once it was going, or at least during the downloading stage, since I still forgot some. Another nice feature there would be to sort the downloads such that it can begin some of the installs while other downloads continue.

It was really pleasing to login to my clean install and immediately have all my old settings present (though since I store some on yet another partition I didn't quite get my look-and-feel back right away). Thankfully a quick dive into /etc/fstab to paste in my old settings quickly resolved this one.

There are some slight issues with Lucid, most noticeably the desktop background isn't quite right though it had already been filed as a bug on Launchpad.

Ubuntu Upgrade - The Plan

Well once again it's time to upgrade my Ubuntu install. OK, so I'm a bit late to be upgrading from Karmic to Lucid, but I've been busy!

Clearly I don't want to lose all that I've built up over the past year or so on this machine, but I have decided that I want to do a clean install. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one is that I haven't done so yet on this machine, and this Lucid is an LTS. Not that this means that I won't upgrade again in November, but it does provide an extra impetus to do it. The upshot here is that I'm going to need to generate a backup of my settings etc. so that I can restore them in Lucid.

User files

Thankfully my /home directory is in fact another partition, which makes it easier to keep, and provides a nearby backup location for all the other files that I've modified that don't live there.

Installed packages:

Thankfully apt remembers which packages the user installed, and which were installed as dependencies. Thus, after much forum searching, I've come up with the following line to grab all the manually installed packages:

aptitude search '~i!~E' | grep -v "i A" | cut -d " " -f 4 | sort | uniq > manual

This searches for all installed (~i) not-Essential (!~E) packaages, removing (-v) those that were installed automatically ("i A"). The descriptions are then removed (cut) and the list sorted and made unique. Since this is quite a big list (and I want to keep it so I can install them back) I threw this into a file.

I plan to run the same line in the new install, and then just ignore any packages already there. I'll probably take the opportunity to re-evaluate what I have installed too.

Config files

Modified config files are so easy to overlook. I expect that everyone's modified a config file somewhere, probably the apache config? These are somewhat harder to find unless you know what you've modified. If you've used gedit to modify them then remembering that it makes backup copies of the files it mods by appending a ~ to the name can give a clue. Beyond that I've not found a foolproof way to locate them, If anyone finds one let me know!

Application Data

Also (sort-of) in this category are things such as any LDAP or MYSQL databases that you might have lying around that you may want to keep.

Extra Repos

I forget to have a look at what repos I had added to my defaults, damn. Be sure you don't!

Laptop Keyboards

I was about to email Engadget with this as an `Ask Engadget` (I have anyway), and figured that this was probably a good place to re-post my gripe.

I've been looking for a new laptop for, well, ages and anything that's about the size that I want (13") seems to have a stupid keyboard unless I pay > £600. And even them most of them seem to suck.

The issue I'm talking about is exemplified by the image from one of their recent posts, where it's clear that more thought has gone into the look of the keyboard (though even there they failed) than the usability. The key issues (pun not intended) is that the keys are in the wrong places. As someone used to the good old style of laptop keyboards (that being basically a desktop keyboard slightly shrunk, no numpad, the arrows moved to beneath the return key, the inset/home/etc. 6 being arranged in a column next to the return key) I can't get used to this new craze to put the backslash above a flat return key. This seems the silliest place possible for it. Not only is it out of reach when you want it (as a massive command line user that's a lot of the time) but it's liable to get hit when you swipe for the enter key (probably the most used on the entire board).

Hence I'm wondering if there's a good reason that these keys are being moved around, and if there's any way we as a user community (please tell me I'm not the only one with this opinion!?) can let the manufacturers know that they're being silly?

In the mean-time if anyone can recommend a good, portable, (hopefully affordable) 13" laptop with a sane keyboard layout I'd much appreciate it. (I'm aware of the ViewSonic VNB131 and very tempted by it, though even that's not perfect)