Geek Post: Updating Ubuntu

I’m out of town but have some time and a nice cable Internet connection so I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 12.04. Upgrading Robert’s PC (Sarah’s old PC), did not go super smoothly and I ended up doing a clean install so I brought along a USB drive to back up to before starting. As an aside, Robert’s PC has had since we got it from Dell a weird intermittent lock up issue. It must be hardware as it’s been consistent from Windows to Fedora to Ubuntu.

At any rate, the download went swimmingly (thanks to the speedy cable connection), the upgrade took a while (and needed more of my attention than I expected to accept or reject a couple changes). On reboot there was a problem: no wireless network.

Fortunately, I had a CAT 5 cable (I’ve had wireless issues before here, but the new router has resolved all of those). Plugging in that wire and doing some Google searching, I was on the right path with uninstalling and reinstalling the Broadcom drivers (bcmwl-kernel-source). However, there was a hitch: every time I tried to remove, install or update software, I got the weird error about “pdvdlinux” — an error I’d seen and glossed over in the upgrade.

Back to Google and several bum leads until I ran into this: post, complete with good,simple instructions on hacking the software database to clean up the issue.

Thank you NerdyKid for the post; thank you Ubuntu for the forum to support the post; and thank you Google for pointing me to the post.

Wireless is back working and now I have to get used to the new user interface for 12.04.

Actually, one annoyance: the resolver doesn’t seem to be getting set correctly: /etc/resolv.conf keeps using 127.0.0.1 for its nameserver rather than what it gets from the WiFi hotspot. It turns out that is intentional as bind is running; I just ran into DNS issues on that otherwise fabulous cable network. Back home, in it’s normal environment and all is well — I’m not sure how well it would be on more restrictive networks…

(In case anyone is more interested: it seems that pdvdlinux was included by Dell when I bought my Inspiron laptop years ago and now the company behind it has dropped Linux support (and may have gone out of business). At any rate, it seems to be a somewhat known issue with Dell / Linux machines.)