Repartitioning went fine. No problems at all.

The update to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon also went very well, with the wireless connection coming straight back up. Just a few niggles to sort out:

1 - The mozilla thunderbird icon disappeared from the quick launch tray. Easy to reinstate.

2 - The clock settings went very strange. This is due to the machine dual booting with windows and both operating systems trying to set the computer's hardware clock to British Summer Time. Resolved in Linux by unchecking the box marked 'use UTC'

3 - Flash. I've been using the flashplugin-nonfree package. The package was still installed, but flash wasn't working. Uninstalling and reinstalling this package in synaptic got flash working again, but the next reboot brought the same problem up.

In firefox, type about:plugins into the address bar to see what plugins are installed. I found three different versions of flash installed. Made note of the dates of each version and went looking for the older versions to delete them.

The file that flashplugin-nonfree gets is called libflashplayer.so. Likely places to find it are in usr/lib/firefox/plugins, myhomedir/.mozilla/plugins, usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree

This last one was the most recent version. Deleting the other versions fixed the problem.

Backing Up and Upgrading

Today I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The object of the day is to end up with it running 7.10. Since 8.04 is released in a few weeks, I'm intending just to do an upgrade, not a complete rebuild.

The story so far:

Problem 1:

The software updater has been telling me for months that the upgrade is available, but that there isn't enough space on the root partition to put the files needed to upgrade. Fine, no problem, I'll repartition.

Problem 2:

Not being particularly confident with partitioning, I decide to do a complete backup of my home directory onto DVD+R. Several days ago I ordered some DVDs and they have now arrived. So, how to burn DVDs. The Ubuntu Forums suggest Gnomebaker so I download it and try to burn a DVD. It won't burn because of problems with the number of levels of embedded directories (see thread). I download K3B and try again. It all works fine.

Repartitioning:
I have a livecd of GParted.
The extended partition that Ubuntu lives on currently has a 4GB ext3 (I think) partition for /, followed by a swap partition, followed by a 60GB or so /home partition. In order to upgrade, I need to move and resize /home, move the swap partition and increase the size of / to about 10GB, to allow for future upgrades etc.

Here goes.