Karmic Koala was released into the wild last Thursday, so naturally I was going to upgrade my desktop installations at home. In this past I had been doing fresh installs whenever there was a new release, since there might be some issues with the new Ext4 file system, I decided to upgrade my current 9.04 installation in place and perform a fresh installation when the Ext4 file system stabilizes.
Since I had quite a few unofficial packages installed on my primary PC, I was not quite sure how the upgrade would turn out and I was prepared to see a few gotchas at some point. But the upgrade process was surprisingly smooth (albeit slow since all new versions of the installed packages had to be fetched first), and when the upgrade process is done I was able to boot into the new desktop. The only thing I needed to do was to re-install the CUDA driver (190.18), but this was to be expected since every major kernel updates would require the CUDA driver to be re-installed. I certainly hope that NVidia would make their proprietary binary drivers more robust by detecting kernel changes and reinstall automatically if necessary as opposed to require the end user’s manual intervention.
For my other machine running Ubuntu 9.04, the upgrade was equally smooth. One of the problems I ran into there was due to my VMWare Server installation. As it turned out, there are some issues with the default installation package that came with VMWare Server 2. The problem however can be resolved with Radu’s installation script.
