Feisty Fawn Upgrade

I don’t know what possessed me to upgrade before this is technically even in beta, but Kubuntu’s update manager asked if I wanted to with a nice easy to click ‘yes’ button. What’s it doing tempting me like that? For a prebeta it went pretty well. It had to download over a Gig of new files. Once that was finally done it started installing, and something went wrong. It then notified me I needed to reboot. I wish I hadn’t.

kernel panic : not syncing; VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

I found tons of articles on google, but it took a while to find something helpful. Finally I found the following advice:

  1. boot from live cd
  2. open a terminal
  3. mkdir /mnt/linux
  4. mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/linux
  5. chroot /mnt/linux /bin/bash
  6. mount -t proc /proc /proc

What this does is essentially give you a terminal working on your hard drive that isn’t booting. From there I just ran

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

to finish the install process, and amazingly linux boot up and the new artwork looks very nice. So far every time I’ve upgraded Ubuntu it breaks my wireless, so I’m getting pretty good at fixing it. My built in wireless card on my Inspiron 9300 is Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03). I have to use ndiswrapper to install drivers. Running

ndiswrapper -l

showed the driver was still installed but running but iwconfig had the incorrect card showing. Thank goodness for ndiswrapper’s driver list that took me forever to find before. It has links straight to the driver downloads. I figured I’d reinstall the drivers, but once I did running dmesg showed

bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.

Looks like the new wireless drivers I downloaded needed a newer firmware. I found running

sudo aptitude install bcm43xx-fwcutter
sudo /usr/share/bcm43xx-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh

took care of that for me. Phew. And now I’m running Feisty Fawn with working wireless. I’m not seeing a lot of differences so far, but this is the first thing I’ve done.