This evening, I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu Linux install from 05.10 (Breezy Badger) to 06.10 (Dapper Drake). Unfortunately, my laptop is getting a little bit temperamental in its old age and tends to shut down suddenly if it gets too hot and the hard work of unpacking and installing all the updates it had just downloaded proved too much.

Gulp! An unscheduled shutdown in the middle of a complete systems upgrade is normally a bad thing. I gave the machine a few minutes to cool, stuck it on a cooling rack (what works for baking works for laptops!) and cautiously pressed the power button to restart. It failed to take me into the graphical user interface but, since I had been doing the upgrade from a command line box anyway that wasn’t a big deal. When I entered the all important line apt-get dist-upgrade it spotted that something had gone wrong and suggested another command to try; I plugged that in and everything was on its merry way (although I was sitting there holding a desk fan to keep the temperature down!).

Here I am now, sitting at my newly upgraded machine and everything seems to be working smoothly (bar things outside the installer program’s control, like bringing my Firefox extensions up to date). It will be a few more days before I’ve got round to checking all the programs I routinely use but I’m very impressed at the robustness of the system!

ps. How comes a laptop becomes “long in the tooth” before its third birthday? Grrr!!!

Tags: ubuntu linux, upgrade, overheating