Karmic Koala

Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) is only a couple of weeks old, and already I'm on to Karmic Koala (9.10). I upgraded, initially, because the goons rolling kernels in 9.04 managed to release TWO kernel packages within two weeks, both of which broke sound from when I was running 9.04-pre-release... so, I was hoping Karmic would have the new 2.6.30 kernel so I could have sound again. This morning, I saw that some kind soul had committed 2.6.30 to the Karmic tree, and my path was set. This has not been an effort for the faint of heart.

After accidentally interrupting an `apt-get dist-upgrade`, I had to hand-salvage my apt-get database by hand removing most of KDE (which is fine, it was there mostly as a novelty anyways). Once that was done, a quick reboot followed by an `apt-get dist-upgrade` brought the system back to a working state, including the new 2.6.30 kernel. w00t! And do you know what? Sound works. Holy crap.

Now, the real crux of my entry today is to document (for myself and others) how to prevent rouge kernel upgrades from fubaring their system. SO, what I've done is mangled /etc/apt/preferences to include the following lines:

Package: linux-image*
Pin: version 2.6.30-2.3
Pin-Priority: 1001

With those in place, no careless kernel commit is going to trash my box. Admittedly, upgrading my kernel will now be a much more manual process, but honestly, how often does that NEED to be done?