Upgrading to 9.10
Originally published at Dom's Blog. You can comment here or there.
I’ve been having problems with the RT2860 wifi adapter in my ASUS Eee 901 under Ubuntu Karmic Koala with WPA networks for some time now, it only seemed to be an isssue on a small number of WPA encrypted networks, so I hadn’t given it a high priority until now. Having some time on my hands this morning thanks to a curtain which doesn’t close, I asked on my local Ubuntu IRC channel and found that similar problems have been reported in the current test release, Lucid Lynx, due for release on April 29th 2010.
The two bugs appear to describe the problems I was having, but the OS version being cited was much more recent that that which I was running. It’s always a good idea to upgrade if you have software problems, so as a test I downloaded the latest Ubuntu 9.10 ISO on to my USB pendrive and booted it; my Ralink 2860 worked perfectly with this WPA network, so I decided to upgrade the OS.
Not being at home right now, I know it was a risky move making such fundamental changes without being able to bacckup /home, but there’s nothing particularly essential in there since this netbook is just for web browsing and ssh, and I have my bookmarks synced with xmarks.
The upgrade went well, and after installing chromium, I’m good to go, including having all browser extensions, since they are in my homedirectory.
I know Linux can be a bit of a pain at times, like when I was trying to fix this beforehand and I couldn’t find the cause because I didn’t know what to search for from the myriad error messages, but it’s all working fine now, so I’m happy.
EDIT: the audio driver for my Intel ICH7 family adapter appears to have a problem in this release, details here.