ricketyclick

I just finished upgrading my Ubuntu Linux installation to 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

The biggest difficulty is that many temporary files are put in the /var and /boot folders. Normally, this is not a problem, but when I set up the system, I gave them dedicated partitions. I sized them according to the advice I found on the web, and in fact oversized them.

Not by enough, apparently. I gave /var a gigabyte, and /boot 100 megs, and they both came up short, by more than half.

I couldn’t easily resize them, because they’re always mounted.

Finally, I booted from the live CD of Ubuntu 7.10 in Hudson and Hudson’s Ubuntu Unleashed, which doesn’t require those folders to mount.

I moved /var (and /tmp) to a 500 GB SATA I’ve installed but not set up yet. This was an interesting exercise, involving hand-editing the /etc/fstab file.

The /boot partition was a bit trickier; I’d hope to use the space recovered when I deleted the old /var and /tmp folders, but unfortunately, they were in an extended partition, and boot is in the primary; apparently, the extended partition cannot be resized. I ended up stealing a couple hundred megs from the vastly oversized /swap partition.

For the most part, the upgrade went smoothly after that. There was one glitch with only the root account being able to log on to the desktop; somehow the permissions on the /etc folder were screwed up.

All done now, though, and I believe 8.10 is noticably snappier than 8.04. Biggest difference I’ve noticed is in the file browser, particularly in folders with heavy graphics content.

Aside from the problems I caused with an overly-spiffy disk layout, the upgrade was essentially painless.

Tags: intrepid ibex, Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 6:51 am and is filed under Computers, Linux, Me, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.