Upgrading Ubuntu Desktop from 8.10 to 9.04 - wireless woes again.

Turning now to upgrading my Ubuntu laptop from 8.10 to 9.04 using the Network Upgrade method. I started by checking to make sure I'm up to date:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Then I ran System/Administration/Update Manager, hit Upgrade and followed the directions.

The irst time through I saw the following, which turned out to be caused by a misconfigured apt-cacher on my apt-cacher system (which I had just upgraded):

Third party sources disabled

Some third party entries in your sources.list were disabled. You can re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool or your package manager.

Followed by:

Error during update

A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of network problem, please check your network connection and retry.

W:Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/restricted/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, W:Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty/multiverse/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, W:Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty-updates/restricted/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, W:Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/jaunty-security/restricted/i18n/Translation-en_US.bz2 Error reading from server - read (104 Connection reset by peer)
, E:Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

After fixing apt-cacher, I ran System/Administration/Update Manager again and it went much more smoothly. Questions asked during the upgrade and my answers:

Replace /etc/services? Yes

...

Could not install 'b43-fwcutter'
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

This turned out to be the sources of wireless woes (more about that later).

Then a couple scary messages I think related to the b43-fwcutter failure.

Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade is now aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).

...

Upgrade complete

The upgrade is completed but there were errors during the upgrade process.

...

Then I went ahead and did a...

#reboot

Booting the system did a "Routine check of drives" took several minutes

And then when it came up, I had no wireless, like last time. I plugged into wired ethernet and that worked - so that's better than last time. First thing I tried was re-enabling third party sources and seeing if there was a new Network Manager. I edited /etc/apt/sources.list and uncommented the following lines:

# Latest version of Network Manager
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

# Dropbox
deb http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty
deb-src http://linux.getdropbox.com/ubuntu jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

#WineHQ - Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt jaunty main # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

# SKYPE
deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free # disabled on upgrade to jaunty

And then I ran:

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

But the only packages that were upraded were nautilus-dropbox and wine. So no luck there.

Ok, going back to b43-fwcutter, I tried the following:

# /usr/share/b43-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh
...
# reboot

And that did the trick!

Now I just did the usual vmware re-configure:

# /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

I accepted all the default. Afterwards, don't forget to fix /etc/vmware/config.

At this point everything seems good...