Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon

So I developed a nasty head cold last night, and as of this morning, am still feeling pretty terrible. I think among the things necessary for a cure are food and fluids, neither of which I've had since my meager bowl of oatmeal last night.

Because I wasn't feeling well, I played on my DS, but eventually got bored. So I decided to upgrade my current system, which ran Ubuntu Fiesty 7.4 to Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10. Flipped open system upgrade, and told it to upgrade to 7.10.

I immediately began having doubts. Usually, when a new OS comes out, there are bugs here and there, and I winced remembering my wireless adventure dealing with my network stuff. Things were working perfectly now, after all.. why change things?

To test how well the upgrade will actually upgrade my system, rather than downgrade it, I authorized the go ahead.

The upgrade was relatively painless; it took about an hour to download the upgrades, and another hour to install all the updates, which was pretty reasonable, especially since I don't have the best of wireless connections here at the apartment. So, I restarted the system to see what it all looked like.

Things were ... mostly the same. Gaim had disappeared, since now Pidgin is exclusively supported. I added the Pidgin Icon to the panel, rearranged it some, and my panel looked as good as normal, save for this weird purple pigeon icon being where my simple, yet elegant yellow man icon used to be. Ah well, I'll get over it. The biggest change was that wireless was no longer working. At all.

SHIT, I thought. This could be for several reasons. 1.) Something different is going on that it was in Fiesty 2.) Something different is going on and it's going on worse because I TOLD ubuntu during the upgrade process to keep the modified blacklist file. SHIT, I thought, shit, shit, shit shit.. Worst of all, at that point in time, I had forgotten that the blacklist file was called "blacklist", so I didn't know where to look.

Rebooted into windows. Came to my blog, saw the notes I made last time about blacklisting goodness. Went back into linux. Located and went into this file:
/etc/modeprob.d/blacklist

After looking at the tail of the list, sure enough, my original changes were there. shit, I thought. So it' s no longer hostap that's the problem... wait, but what if hostap has control, and orinoco is the trouble? A few quick changes to the blacklist file yielded the tail of blacklist to look like this:

#buggy network-manager causes ornico to fight with it for wireless card
#blacklist hostap
#blacklist hostap_pci
blacklist hermes
blacklist p80211
blacklist prism2_pci
blacklist orinoco
blacklist orinoco_pci

With my fingers crossed, I restarted the system. Ubuntu came back up, and lo and behold! Wireless was working! Hooray! Scanning is re-enabled, and things looked like it was full of win. I was pleased to see that vpnc was part of the default install, and that all my previous settings were saved. Let's see if I can connect to the external VPN. A button click and two passwords yielded:

VPN Connect Failure

Could not start the VPN connection 'External VPN' due to a connection error.

The VPN login failed because the VPN program could not connect to the VPN server.


Shit, I thought. Not good. I checked configuration file. No problems seem to be there, since indeed, it was my previous settings. I was able to connect via external VPN no problem since I last checked, which was two days ago. Could something actually be wrong with External VPN connection at RPI? or is it VPNc? Let's check.

System reboot into Windows.