LinLog

In a fit of optimism, I decided to upgrade my laptop to Kubuntu Dapper last night.  As usual, the upgrade process really sucked.  This time I knew what to look for, so it didn't suck as hard as the last time, but it still sucked.  Ubuntu may be a really great distribution, but they really need to work on the upgrade procedure.  I don't want to waste my time rebuilding a working system every six months.

After playing around with possible dependencies for way, way too long, I was finally able to get around that "upgrading uninstalls KDE" problem I had last time.  I ended up removing KOffice (which I wasn't using anyway), Amarok, and k3b-mp3.  I'm not sure exactly which package caused the problem, but after that I was able to mark all upgrades and then kubuntu-desktop, which gave me a proper upgrade.  Of course, I still had to go through a few dozen packages that Adept wanted to remove rather than upgrade (like kdegames and kile), but I eventually got everything I wanted marked for upgrade and the package installs went smoothly.

The main problem I had was that my WiFi card stopped working after I rebooted.  It took a disturbingly long time to figure out the problem, but I've got it sorted now.  It seems that Dapper includes a driver it thinks works with my integrated Broadcom BCM4318 card, but really doesn't. Naturally, this conflicted with the working NDISwrapper installation. All I had to do to fix it was add the bcm43xx driver to my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file. After that, ndiswrapper was free and clear and my WiFi connection was fixed.