Ubuntu 10.04 alias Lucid Lynx has arrived and because this is a long-time support version, many users are bound to upgrade within the next few weeks. It seems like the GUI people from Canonical were unusually daring this time. Not only is this the first Ubuntu version that sports a graphical interface that is NOT BROWN (shock!), but the window control buttons are on the wrong side, namely on the left (double shock!). Apparently, Mac OSX Leopard has godfathered here. Well, I am not going to get used window controls on the left side, so I applied a quick fix which is amply documented on the Internet, as many people seem to feel the same way. Otherwise, the new look is a welcome change, as the permutations of brown and orange seemed to have been exhausted.

The only thing that turned out to be slightly trickier was the Tomcat upgrade to 6.0.24. A surreptitious installation of Apache 2 (the purpose of which eluded me) took possession of port 80 which on my machine was previously occupied by the system-wide Tomcat installation. This was rather easy to solve with the command: sudo update-rc.d -f apache2 remove to disable Apache on boot. It turned out, however, that the application launcher jsvc was removed in Ubuntu 10.04. Since Tomcat previously used jsvc to launch Tomcat on privileged ports, Tomcat was not able to bind to port 80 any longer. I was able to solve this by setting the AUTHBIND variable in /etc/default/tomcat to ‘yes’. After that Tomcat started up on port 80 without complaints.

During the upgrade, the system politely asked whether to replace or keep manually changed system configuration files. I have chosen to replace most files, because, the upgrade manager is kind enough to create a copy of the existing configuration using the *.dpkg-old extension during the upgrade. That way I was able to diff configuration files later and incorporate any customisations into the new files. This method is superior to keeping the old files, because it allows for upgrading the configuration files in sync with the latest program versions, though, of course it takes a bit of work manually diffing and patching those files if you happen to have numerous customisations. You can alternatively keep the old files and then diff and patch the new files created by the upgrade manager with the *.dist extension. In summary, the upgrade was painless and took less than 90 minutes per machine.