I upgraded to 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago
On Thursday, Ubuntu prompted me, asking if I wanted to upgrade from version 11.04 to 11.10. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have the latest version, so I clicked yes to the upgrade. It told me it was going to take 2 - 3 hours to upgrade, which I was fine with. In the middle of the upgrade, the screen turned black and a message told me that a file was corrupted. I started to panic, so I turned off my computer and turned it back on. Instead of booting up like normal, it brought me to a recovery mode screen. At first, I tried booting up my computer regularly, but that didn’t work. Then I tried booting it into safe mode, which brought me to a low-graphics version of Ubuntu, but I was never able to get past the logo screen. I started to panic even more because I had some unsaved files, including Java exercises and my Priceless Item stuff. I fiddled with the options for awhile, and tried booting up into previous Ubuntu versions, but nothing seemed to work.
On Friday, I asked my mom if she could help me recover some of my files before reinstalling Ubuntu. She took out my HDD and tried to hook it up to her Windows 7 computer, but Windows couldn’t read the HDD for some odd reason. We tried the same thing on my brother’s Mac, but it didn’t recognize the HDD, either. Then, I got a bright idea. I decided to download a fresh copy of Ubuntu 11.10 onto my 2GB SD card. Ubuntu has this neat feature where one can try out the OS before installing it onto the HDD. I plugged my SD card into my laptop and booted Ubuntu successfully. And what do you know? Ubuntu was able to read all of my files, so I backed up everything that I needed onto my 32GB SD card and then re-installed Ubuntu.
It recognized that I still had Ubuntu 11.04, and it asked me if I wanted to upgrade instead of deleting everything and starting over. To make a long story short, it froze before ever finishing the update. I finally said “screw it” to upgrading properly, deleted my partition, and installed Ubuntu 11.10 fresh.
I have no idea why Ubuntu acted the way that it did. I really hope I don’t have to do this every time I want to upgrade my OS.
I also want to mention something about Ubuntu 11.10 before I end this post. I like how they made the Software Manager more user-friendly and more-prone to being able to recognize .deb files.
One thing that I am not happy with is how they removed support for the official Sun Java 6 packages and you are now forced to use the OpenJDK packages instead. As a developer, I don’t appreciate this in the slightest. OpenJDK will always lag behind as well as not supporting all of the features of the official version. I looked up a tutorial, and I successfully installed the official version of Java 7. When I decided to open Eclipse, I got this vague error message about it not being able to recognize my JDK version. I got flustered and searched everywhere for a solution, but nothing worked. Not wanting to deal with it, I reluctantly re-installed OpenJDK 7 and then the Eclipse problem went away.
Lesson learned: always back up your stuff before upgrading to a new OS. Also, if the OpenJDK becomes a problem for me, I might have to look into different Linux distributions that support the official version.
