Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 (Intrepid Ibex and Jaunty Jackalope) upgrade notes

I’m at WordCamp San Francisco today and decided that running a year old version of WordPress (on a year old version of Ubuntu Linux) was undesirable. So, with the confidence that comes from many relatively easy Ubuntu OS upgrades, I charged ahead. For (I think) the second time ever, things went badly. Here’s what I did and how I fixed it.
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CentOS 5.3 Minimal VPS Install Guide

I just did this yesterday; you can pretty much just follow my CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide.

The differences are:

  • When you get to the “More Minimizing” section, yum -C grouplist will show a package called “Yum Utilities” which you probably want to leave installed.
  • The Deployment_Guide-en-US file is not there so you don’t need to remove it.

That’s it.

I should also note that downloading a 3.9GB DVD ISO image in order to build a ~700MB installed OS may not be very efficient. I didn’t bother looking for a network installer but that might be the way to get this done faster.

CentOS 5.1 Minimal VPS Install Guide

I’m working on a project that is deploying on CentOS 5.1, and I found it not entirely obvious how to install a really stripped down server, as a starting point for a lean and mean, hardened production server. Since I’m doing work on this at home on VMWare, and it’s being deployed on a VPS initially (and probably will remain virtualized for ease of management as it scales up), this guide is specifically aimed at this kind of configuration.

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Upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” on Xen

I have a VPS hosted at RimuHosting.com. I waited a while (3 months) for bugs to be squashed before upgrading it to Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”). There was one new issue.

BTW, my non-Rimu home server was the first thing I updated. Notes are here.

The only Xen wrinkle is that you need the libc6-xen package. I don’t know if that’s in Feisty or not. In my case I experienced a slew of scary Segmentation Fault errors in the package configuration stage. I found :this post which contains a solution for the problem. But if possible you might want to try installing that package before upgrading. If that doesn’t work, just use the method described in that post.

After doing that and running dpkg --configure -a, it was okay. It did complain about AppArmor and being unable to do something with modules, but that seems to be not germane to Xen so I ignored it and rebooted, and everything seems fine.

Looking forward to LinuxWorld Expo SF 2007

Last year I was doing mobile development and there was interesting Linux-as-smartphone-OS stuff going on. Now I’m doing Ruby on Rails development and there’s interesting server grid stuff going on. Here’s what I’m looking forward to finding out more about (all of these are things I’ve been watching or directly researching already):
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