Ubuntu, upgrades, insanity and me
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
—Albert Einstein
“‘Holy crap no way that actually worked’: doing something, failing, ignoring it for years, coming back, trying again and having it work.”
—Grant Lammi
“Insane in da membrane (Insane in da brain)”
—Cyprus Hill
One of the things about working on a product that is cross platform is that every so often you have to jump to some other operating system to make sure that the bugs you just wrote perform equally as well everywhere. The other day I dusted off my Ubuntu Linux virtual machine and fired it up to do some testing. I hadn’t started it in a long time, probably six months or so since I had been using a different virtual machine. As I got to working the “You aren’t up to date why aren’t you up to date don’t you want to be up to date” nag dialog popped up.
Normally I don’t pay these things much attention, particularly for a VM I don’t use that much, and just click whatever makes it install everything. (That’s the “Shut up” button.) Before I made it there though I saw the button above it:

Does that say a new distribution is available by just clicking an upgrade button?
Does clicking on that upgrade this entire distro to the new version and actually work?
No way.
Or way?
Now before I go into what happened after I pressed the “Super magic I can’t believe this is possible because of my old jaded Linux experience” button let’s take a walk down memory lane.
I first starting using Linux in college in 1994. Back then it was the perfect storm of:
1. Being able to run Unix at home and not have to go to the labs
2. Being able to run Unix at home for free which was good since I was broke
3. Having enough free time on my hands to spend all night monkeying with kernel compilation settings trying to get my Opti Mad 16 sound card to actually, well, play sound.
I did configure; make; make install.
I did rpm -Uvh *.
I broke my local system by installing Evolution and its 60 bajillion dependencies so many times I can’t count.
When it came time to upgrade the distro I popped in the InfoMagic CD, backed up my /home directory, did whatever the README said, then sat around and watched the kernel compile.

And then I got a Mac with OS X. A new perfect storm hit:
1. I was able to still run a Unix at home, this time with a nice UI.
2. I had a job and was no longer broke.
3. I had a job and no longer had the tons of free time I had before.
Installing and upgrading turned into an exercise of clicking the shiny blue button and then getting a soda. I gave Linux a hearty handshake, thanked him for his service and wished him the best of luck in all his future endeavors.
So back to today. I hadn’t done a Linux upgrade in years. I hadn’t compiled a Linux kernel in years. Anymore I’d just toss out the VM and install from scratch. Today, however, I clicked the “Magic upgrade my Linux distro” button.
(What? Did you think I wouldn’t click on it? What kind of blog post would this be then with all that lead up? I’ll tell you what kind, a darned funny one. Oh well, sometimes you sacrifice comedy for operating system upgrades.)
So after The Click this happened:

Followed by this:

Which after a reboot resulted in this:

*Blinks*
*Points*
*Blinks*
Wow. It worked.*
So color me impressed and man has this stuff come a long way since the olden days. Does this mean I’m going back to Linux and giving up my seamless, rounded cornered Apple Mac fanboy membership card?
Of course I’m not. I didn’t click the “Go insane” button.
*Yes, I understand that Ubuntu has had this ability for years and I’m super lame for just now noticing it. In my defense it has been the Year of the Linux desktop for a decade.
