Ubuntu 8.04 upgrade == not so painless

I took the leap into Ubuntu 8.04 today on my HP nx9420. In typical fashion I didn't really think about it before I did it. That was probably an error in judgment on my part. Fortunately, things didn't go badly for me. I would say that they did NOT go smoothly -- I would expect that a Linux user of less experience would've been fighting these issues for days instead of a couple of hours. Briefly, I had four issues: 1) I dorked-up and let debconf over-right my grub.conf, 2) my video resolution in X was AWFUL, 3) the wireless driver would not associate with any wireless access-points and 4) video didn't resume after suspend.

The whole issue with debconf and my grub menu.lst boils down to the fact that I have a lot of different kernels sitting in /boot and it didn't pick the "right one" and what's more it picked one that didn't have an initrd. SO, on reboot I got a lovely kernel panic. After booting to a Debian 4.0 CD I had laying around, I was able to determine the problem and resolve it without too much issue. Stupid. Teach me to leave unused kernels about my file-system!

The video resolution with laptops and nVidia gfx cards always seems to be an issue. Fortunately, the ONE file I did back-up before the install took-off in full-swing, was my xorg.conf file. I simply copied it back to /etc/X11 and all was well. Incidentally, this was also the source of my woes in regards to video resuming after suspend.

Wireless on this thing really blew me away. Not that it was that hard to fix, but figuring it out wasn't so trivial. The basic problem is that there's a bug in the 2.6.24-16 kernel that comes with 8.04 by default, that affects anyone who uses an Intel wireless chipset (i.e. the iwl3945 or the iwl4965). This can only be resolved by either rebuilding your kernel or installing the Linux Wireless compatibility drivers from the Linux Wireless Project. Fortunately, installing the wireless compatibility drivers is virtually trivial. There are thorough instructions on the LWP homepage. I suggest you follow-them.

On a side-note, I did have to go through /etc/default/acpi-support and make the changes I noted on the Ubunto Laptop Testing Team wiki. Had I not previously applied Stephane Grabber's HP resume patch, I would've had to do that as well.