[tlug] Kubuntu 8.04->8.10 Upgrade: Two for Two

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

CL writes:
 > Regular readers may recall my adventures trying to upgrade a basic 
 > Kubuntu v.8.04 (Horny Hamster) installation on my ThinkPad to v.8.10 
 > (Irritating Idiot).  At that time, the first reboot produced no login 
 > combobox and all attempts to correct the problem failed.  Well, idiot 
 > that I am, I decided to upgrade my desktop to 8.10 after stabilizing my 
 > laptop.  There are enough useful changes to make it desirable.

Heh.  I'm discovering a drop of sympathy for our other K?Ubuntu victim.

 > -  Tried to access and edit files using both a v.8.10 installation disk 
 > and Knoppix 5.3.1 but nothing saved to disk permanently.

Hm.  Check the mtab (or just output of 'mount').  ISTR something about
"unionfs" from David Bernat's posts.  For the not yet clued in to that
concept, a *union file system* is a file system with multiple media
being mounted in the same place.  So for example you mount both a
CD-ROM and a ramdisk on /etc.  The unionfs is configured to look in
the ramdisk first, then the CD-ROM.  Look how this works.  You execute
"mount -a", which looks in the ramdisk for /etc/fstab.  Nothing there,
so it goes on to look on the CD, where it finds /etc/fstab.  It mounts
the disks, and now it wants to write /etc/mtab.  It opens the file on
the ramdisk with O_CREAT, which works.

Now if you want to look at /etc/mtab, the kernel finds it on the
ramdisk, and never looks at the CD.  But if you try to edit
/etc/fstab, it's not on the ramdisk, so the virtual file system code
falls back to the CD, and finds it there.  Now, you save.  *The
unionfs will try to save to the ramdisk first*, and it will succeed.
But guess what?  Reboot, and the ramdisk goes where all virtual
particles go, taking your edits with it.

I wonder if that could be related to the phenomenon you describe.
OTOH, if you do

    mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /mnt

that should *not* be a unionfs, and it *should* work (in the sense of
actually writing to the HDD).  Are you telling me that it didn't?

 > All-in-all this upgrade seems to be about as big a PITA as the upgrade 
 > from WIN3.1 to W2K was ... but that was a long time ago, now ...

Heh.  I run `sid' on my Debian boxes and "emerge -u world" on Gentoo
practically every day, and the only really annoying issues I've had
since about 1997 (when I swore off Red Hat for life) were the Debian
"$65536 question" bug so that all my accesses to everywhere got
denied, and a total failure of SSH to work on Gentoo.

And of course there was the WinNT 3.2beta to 3.2final upgrade that
wiped my hard drive clean....