Ubuntu 11.10 install: Hanging at "Checking Battery Status"

I started by doing an upgrade of my 10.04 system to 11.10, but ran into the dreaded hang on boot at "Checking for battery Status".

Turns out this has nothing to do with a battery (mine is a desktop system), this is just where boot hangs if you have video driver problems.

After trying many, many, many, many, many, many, things, including a fresh install, here's what finally got it working for me...

It was the combination of this post:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gdm xorg

And this post:

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get remove nvidia-* 
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-'uname -r' 
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current   
sudo nvidia-xconfig
sudo apt-get update
echo options nouveau modeset=0 | sudo tee --append /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf
echo RUN+="/sbin/modprobe nvidia" | sudo tee --append /etc/udev/rules.d/90-modprobe.rules
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo reboot

What I actually ended up doing was the gdm and xorg reinstall from the first post, then the second post and then the first post again.

I suspect I could have just done second post followed by first post, but haven't done a clear re-install to try it.

Upgrading laptop from 9.10 to 10.04 to 10.10

1. Installed all Updates
2. Clicked 'Upgrade' in the Update Manager to update to 10.04.1 LTS
1. Some Third party sources disabled.
2. ~1.7GB download
3. Couple hours and a number of dialog boxes later upgrade was done.
3. First boot after upgrade I get an error message: "An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb". Solution found in the forums.
4. Ran Update Manager again, system was up-to-date, installed 6 updates.
5. Still didn't show upgrade to 10.10. Had to click on Settings and then under Release upgrade, select Normal Releases. Clicked Close and then Check again. Now Upgrade button was available.
6. Clicked 'Upgrade' to upgrade to 10.10
1. Another ~1.7 GB of download.
2. Few hours later and a reboot and I'm at 10.10

Upgrading laptop from 9.04 to 9.10

Upgraded my Ubuntu laptop from 9.04 to 9.10. No major issues.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

As with 8.10 upgrade, my Firefox is all messed up. Google toolbar and all my other extension buttons are gone. To get them back I had to disable the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" and then I was able to restore everything.

Installing VMServer 2.0.1

Having just upgraded to 9.04, it seemed like a good time to catch up on my VMWare server upgrades, since I was still on 1.0.7, which is getting a little old.

I started by trying to upgrade to 1.0.9, but I could not get the vmmon module to build...

So, I shifted gears and tried installing 2.0.1 following the directions at VMWare Server 2.01 on Ubuntu 9.04.

I downloaded the 2.0.1 tarball and tried installing it following those directions.

$tar xvfz ~/Downloads/VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386.tar.gz
$cd vmware-server-distrib/
$patch ./bin/vmware-config.pl ~/Downloads/vmware-config.pl.patch.txt
$sudo ./vmware-install.pl

I took the default answers except for the following:

Your computer has multiple ethernet network interfaces available: eth0, pan0,
wlan0. Which one do you want to bridge to vmnet0? [eth0] wlan0

The current administrative user for VMware Server is ''. Would you like to
specify a different administrator? [no] yes

Please specify the user whom you wish to be the VMware Server administrator
von

I actually goofed typing in my serial number, but looks like my existing VMServer 1.0 license worked.

Upgrading Mythbuntu from 8.10 to 9.04

Time to upgrade my Mythbuntu box to 9.04 from 8.10. I followed the Network Upgrade directions.

Not unsurprisingly, update-manage-core was already installed, so on to the upgrade (only showing highlights):

# do-release-upgrade
...
8 packages are going to be removed. 82 new packages are going to be
installed. 731 packages are going to be upgraded.
...
What is the password for the MySQL administrator account 'root':

Hmmm. I just enter here, I got an error about a database connection being refused and the upgrade continued. AFAICT, it worked out OK.

...
Will you be using this webserver exclusively with mythweb? Yes

Configuration file `/etc/services'
==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
Y or I : install the package maintainer's version

I got asked about apt-cacher.conf - I hit "D" to get diffs and I got an error and the install went on. Fortunately I got another chance at this later...

What would you like to do about smb.conf? I kept the local version currently installed
...
Configuration file `/etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf'
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
...

The ending of the upgrade did not look good:

--2009-05-02 10:23:29-- http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/andale32.exe
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:3142... connected.
Proxy request sent, awaiting response... 403 Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file: andale32.exe
2009-05-02 10:23:29 ERROR 403: Sorry, not allowed to fetch that type of file: andale32.exe.

andale32.exe: No such file or directory

All done, errors in processing 1 file(s)
dpkg: error processing ttf-mscorefonts-installer (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
ttf-mscorefonts-installer

I'm not sure what ttf-mscorefonts is, but doesn't seem to have any major impact.

Upgrade complete.

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

Ok, not the best message at the end, but at leat things have finished.

First thing I noticed is I started getting emails from cron:

Subject: Cron [ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null
Sorry, failed to fetch http://localhost:6544/xml.

Hmmm. Well, first things first, just on principle:

#reboot

System comes up fine in MythTV. Everything seems to be working well.

Hmmm, another email from cron:

Subject: Cron [ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null
mv: cannot stat `/var/run/motd.new': No such file or directory

Update: This problem was caused by two cron jobs both trying to modify /etc/motd at the same time (every 10 minutes)! The update-motd cron job moves /var/run/motd.new out from underneath the mythtv-status job. You can see the two jobs in /etc/cron.d:

# grep 10 /etc/cron.d/mythtv-status /etc/cron.d/update-motd
/etc/cron.d/mythtv-status:*/10 * * * * root [ -x /etc/init.d/mythtv-status ] && /etc/init.d/mythtv-status reload > /dev/null
/etc/cron.d/update-motd:*/10 * * * * root [ -x /usr/sbin/update-motd ] && /usr/sbin/update-motd 2>/dev/null

I believe what should really be happening is myth-status should be run by update-motd every 10 minutes instead of independently. Here is what I did to make that happen:

# rm /etc/cron.d/mythtv-status
# cd /etc/update-motd.d/
# ln -s /usr/bin/mythtv-status 50-mythtv-status

Test it out...

# /usr/sbin/update-motd
# cat /etc/motd
Linux casey 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686
...typical motd stuff...

MythTV status for localhost
===========================
...typical mythtv-status stuff...

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

End Update.

Checked on vmware and it wasn't running. Usual problem:

# /etc/init.d/vmware start
VMware Server is installed, but it has not been (correctly) configured
for the running kernel. To (re-)configure it, invoke the
following command: /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl.

Usual fix:

# /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

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

I then checked /usr/share/apt-cacher/apt-cacher-report.pl to see if I needed to patch it and it had been fixed in the distribution - yeah!

Well, I think that's it. Will update this post if I run into any more problems.

Update: This system also acts as my apt-cacher, and when I went to upgrade the next system I got "104 Connection reset by peer" errors. Turns out I had to use the new /etc/apt-cacher/apt-acher.conf file:

# cd /etc/apt-cacher
# mv apt-cacher.conf apt-cacher.conf.8.10
# cp apt-cacher.conf.dpkg-dist apt-cacher.conf
# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart
Restarting Apt-Cacher: apt-cacher.

For the record, here's the diff:

# diff apt-cacher.conf.8.10 apt-cacher.conf

26c26
< # optional setting, binds the listening daemon to one specified IP. Use IP --- > # optional setting, binds the listening daemon to specified IP(s). Use IP
40c40
< allowed_hosts="192.168.1.0/24,"> allowed_hosts=*
43c43
< # And similiarly for IPv6 with allowed_hosts_6 and denied_hosts_6. --- > # And similarly for IPv6 with allowed_hosts_6 and denied_hosts_6.
49c49
< # This thing can be done by Apache but is much simplier here - limit access to --- > # This thing can be done by Apache but is much simpler here - limit access to
112a113,117
> # This sets the interface to use for the upstream connection.
> # Specify an interface name, an IP address or a host name.
> # If unset, the default route is used.
> #interface=
>
125,126c130,131
< # To enable data checksumming, install libdbd-sqlite3-perl and set this option < # to 1. Then wait untill the Packages/Sources files have been refreshed once --- > # To enable data checksumming, install libberkeleydb-perl and set this option
> # to 1. Then wait until the Packages/Sources files have been refreshed once
133c138
< # apt-cacher server is beeing relocated (via apt-get's error messages while --- > # apt-cacher server is being relocated (via apt-get's error messages while
140,143c145,147
< # also the only method to use FTP access to the target hosts. The syntax is simple, the part of the beginning to replace, followed by a list of mirror urls, all space separated. Multiple profile are separated by semicolons < # path_map = debian ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/debian ftp2.de.debian.org/debian ; ubuntu archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu ; security security.debian.org/debian-security ftp2.de.debian.org/debian-security < path_map =" debuntu"> # also the only method to use FTP access to the target hosts. The syntax is
> # simple, the part of the beginning to replace, followed by a list of mirror
> # urls, all space separated. Multiple profile are separated by semicolons
146a151,163
> # path_map = debian ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/debian ftp2.de.debian.org/debian ; ubuntu archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu ; security security.debian.org/debian-security ftp2.de.debian.org/debian-security
>
> # Permitted package files - this is a perl regular expression which matches all
> # package-type files (files that are uniquely identified by their filename).
> # The default is:
> #package_files_regexp = (?:\.deb|\.rpm|\.dsc|\.tar\.gz|\.diff\.gz|\.udeb|index\.db-.+\.gz|\.jigdo|\.template)$
>
> # Permitted Index files - this is the perl regular expression which matches all
> # index-type files (files that are uniquely identified by their full path and
> # need to be checked for freshness).
> #The default is:
> #index_files_regexp = (?:Index|Packages\.gz|Packages\.bz2|Release|Release\.gpg|Sources\.gz|Sources\.bz2|Contents-.+\.gz|pkglist.*\.bz2|release|release\..*|srclist.*\.bz2|Translation-.+\.bz2)$
>

Upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop VM to 9.04

Short version: Don't try upgrading a 8.04 Ubuntu Desktop VM with only 4GB of disk to 8.10 - there isn't enough disk space.

I decided to start playing with Ubuntu 9.04 by upgrading a 8.04 Ubuntu Desktop VM I had. Since it was two version behind I followed the upgrade directions to bring it up to 8.10 first. A key bit in the directions is opening Software Sources and selecting "Normal releases" under the Updates tab, otherwise Update Manager won't show the update version.

I fired up the Update Manager, upgraded a number of packages, and then fired up the upgrade to 8.10. Unfortunately it died with the following message:

The upgrade aborts now. The upgrade needs a total of 649M free space on disk '/'. Please free at least an additional 243M of disk space on '/'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'.

So I did as it suggested and ran 'apt-get clean', which seemed to free up ~720MB of disk space:

# apt-get clean
# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 3920768 2993528 729644 81% /
...

Now I trued Update Manager again, but it failed again with a similar message:

The upgrade aborts now. The upgrade needs a total of 975M free space on disk '/'. Please free at least an additional 306M of disk space on '/'. Empty your trash and remove temporary packages of former installations using 'sudo apt-get clean'.

So now I need 975MB of space. I give up.

Lesson learned, give Ubuntu more than 4GB if you think you might want to upgrade it.

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...

Cron-apt and reboot needed...

I've noticed that when cron-apt upgrades the kernel and I don't get around to rebooting the system that day, it will keep "reinstalling" the new kernel each night it runs until I reboot the system.

Not sure what to do about this at the moment. Guess it doesn't really hurt anything. Since there doesn't seem to be any way of automatically detecting if a reboot is needed, the only option would seem to be always reboot nightly.

Going to think about this for a while. If anyone has any suggestions, please comment away.

Kernel updates and VMWare

I've noticed every time my kernel is updated, I have to rerun '/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl' before VMWare will start. So far I've always been able to just take the default options.

Upgrading my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10 - network manager applet woes!

After upgrading my Ubuntu servers to 8.10, I turned my attention to my Ubuntu laptop running Ubuntu desktop. I used the Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Desktops.

The upgrade went smoothly, though it took a few hours (much longer than the server upgrades) and seemed to go in spurts (perhaps because of apt-cacher?). I did get one pop-up message I noted for later:

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.

I installed new versions of:

• /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Files I kept:

• /etc/services

55 obsolete packages were removed.

Afterwards, I rebooted and the fun began as the system couldn't connect to my wireless network. First thing I noticed was the following message in /var/log/messages:

Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.051333] input: b43-phy0 as /devices/virtual/input/input14
Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.256065] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 351.126 (2006-07-29 05:54:02)
Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.256080] b43-phy0 warning: You are using an old firmware image. Support for old firmware will be removed in July 2008.
Nov 1 16:31:32 von-laptop kernel: [ 470.256085] b43-phy0 warning: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the latest firmware (version 4).

Following the directions pointed to by the log message I ran the following command which installed new wireless drivers.

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

I rebooted and the driver message disappeared, but didn't fix the original problem and I still wasn't getting on the network.

So, next I connected to my wired network. Or at least I tried. Evening after plugging into my cat5 ethernet, I still wasn't getting a network connection. Very weird.

After poking around some I realized that the system was actually connecting to the wireless network, it's just that it wasn't getting an IP addresss via DHCP correctly. If I ran 'dhclient' manually, I got on the network just fine. Only problem was every few minutes the network manager tried to reconnect me, so I had to kill it ('killall nm-applet') to stay connected.

Next I tried upgrading to the latest network manager (as I did previously). I added the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list. Note these are the same lines I had before that the upgrade commented out, but with "hardy" changed to "intrepid".

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu intrepid main

And upgraded via apt-get:

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade

Which installed new versions of libnm-glib0, libnm-util0, and network-manager. And then I rebooted... and my network came back up!

Ok, lesson learned is apparently I need to be prepared to keep up to date with the network manager applet separately.

Update: One annoyance still remaining, my firefox is all messed up. Google toolbar and all my other extension buttons are gone. To get them back I had to disable the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" and then I was able to restore everything.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10

Ok, upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10. I started with my servers and followed the directions at Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Servers.

update-manager-core was already installed. I edited /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set "Prompt=normal", changing from "lts".

Then I tried running 'do-release-upgrade' and ran into my first problem:

# do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new ubuntu release
Failed Upgrade tool signature
Done Upgrade tool
Done downloading
extracting 'intrepid.tar.gz'
authenticate 'intrepid.tar.gz' against 'intrepid.tar.gz.gpg'
exception from gpg: GnuPG exited non-zero, with code 131072
Debug information:

gpg: WARNING: unsafe permissions on homedir `/tmp/tmpc88EwD'

gpg: can't open `/tmp/tmpc88EwD/intrepid.tar.gz.gpg'
gpg: verify signatures failed: file open error

Authentication failed
Authenticating the upgrade failed. There may be a problem with the network or with the server.

I suspected this has something to do with my use of apt-cacher. Poking around the net I found this bug which backed that up and provided a patch to apt-cacher.

Back on my caching system, I did the following to apply the patch:

# cp /usr/sbin/apt-cacher /usr/sbin/apt-cacher.orig
# vi /usr/sbin/apt-cacher
# diff /usr/sbin/apt-cacher.orig /usr/sbin/apt-cacher

111c111,112
<                  'Translation-.+\.bz2'
---
>                  'Translation-.+\.bz2',
>                    '[:alpha:]*\.tar\.gz\.gpg$'

And then I had to restart apt-cacher:

# /etc/init.d/apt-cacher restart
Restarting Apt-Cacher: apt-cacher.

Then back on my upgrading system, I ran 'do-release-upgrade' again and it worked fine.

On various systems, I installed the new version of:

• /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
• /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01ubuntu

I kept my versions of the following files:

• /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
• /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
• /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
• /etc/smb.conf
• /etc/services
• /etc/smb.conf
• /etc/apt-cacher/apt-cacher.conf

I removed 19-20 obsolete packages and then answered "y" to reboot at the end. When the system came back up, all looked good:

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

For my mythbuntu box, I followed the same network upgrade procedure as above. 54 obsolete packages were removed.

Still to go is getting VMWare back up and working and upgrading my Ubuntu laptop. Those will follow in separate posts.

Upgrading from 7.04 to 8.04

Following directions at:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Start with upgrade to 7.10:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GutsyUpgrades

That worked flawlessly. Then I basically repeated that step, running the Update Manager again, to upgrade to 8.04.

This time, it didn't go so well. The update froze at

Generating locales...
en_AU.UTF-8...

Fortunately, this thread on the Ubuntu forums shorted things out for me.

So now things seems to be up and running for the most part...

One thing that is obviously broken is the remote control - aka LIRC. No surprise, it breaks every time the wind blows I'm sorry to say.

I reinstalled LIRC per directions here. Except, my lirc device was /dev/lirc/0 instead of /dev/lirc0. This effected some of the testing and also meant I had to change /etc/lirc/hardware.conf:

REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/lirc0"

to

REMOTE_DEVICE="/dev/lirc/0"

Then a reboot (always seems necessary with lirc) and that seems to be working.

Ok, Apache doesn't seem to be running. But I think it's time to look into a VMWare appliance...

Upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04 'Feisty Fawn'

Time to bite the bullet today and upgrade the ubuntu box. So I logged out from the mythv account and logged into my admin account and used the package updater. The first thing it did was tell be it was disabling some third party sources. Then it did some checking and told me it planned to remove 16 packages, install 128 new ones and upgrade 994.

After consenting to that it started the upgrade, which it estimated would take about 30 minutes - it reality it took about an hour. Some things that I was asked during the upgrade:

• It asked about replacing customized /etc/logins.def - I looked at the diff and saw no changes that that warranted keeping the current version, so I told it to go ahead.
• Which services should be restarted to use new linssl libraries, I responded with the default which was "ssh".
• It asked about replacing /etc/mysql/my.cnf - the only change that looked relevant was the "bind-address = 127.0.0.1" line, so I told it go ahead.
• It asked about replacing /etc/modprobe.d/aliases - the only difference appeared to be a line of the form "alias char-major-10-187 irnet" - I told it go ahead.
• It asked about replacing /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf - the only difference appeared to be the line "enable-dbus=yes" - I told it to go ahead.
• It asked about replacing /etc/cups/cupsd.conf - the changes appeared minor and since I no longer have the printer connected I told it go ahead
• The upgrade failed trying to install install libxml-sax-perl - "subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 255". This resulted in failures in libxml-simple-perl, xmltv-util, xmltv-gui, xmltv and mythvideo. More below.
  
• It asked about replacing /etc/ntp.conf - no differences that mattered to me so I told it to go ahead.

At this point everything hung and I power-cycled. It came back up into mythtv and tried to start it. I canceled that, logged out, and logged back in as an admin. I ran the Update Manager and it did a Partial Upgrade - this failed on the libxml-sax-perl module again.

I rebooted. It tried to start up mythtv automatically but complained the autologin user (which is what is used to automatically log into the mythtv account) wasn't a member of the mythtv group. So I logged in as admin and added autologin to the mythtv group.

At this point mythtv seems to be running fine, but the remote isn't working. I re-installed lirc as described here and that solved that problem.

Back to the libxml-sax-perl module, poking around revealed the source of the problem - I actually had three versions of SAX.pm. The one in /usr/share/perl5 seems to have the required bebian method, but all attempts to get the install to use it crapped out for one reason or another. So rather painfully I ended up uninstalling libxml2 and then reinstalling everything that depending on it. Painful and I'm sure there has got to be a better way.

Lastly, apt-get was giving me the following message:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libmpich1.0c2 libopenexr2c2a mythmusic libarts1c2a libzzip-0-12 kdelibs4c2a
libfaad2-0 python2.4-dev apache2-utils mythphone mythbrowser tetex-base
fftw2 kdelibs-data mythdvd libapr0 liblualib50 mythgallery libwavpack0
gcc-3.4-base mythgame libossp-uuid13 libsvn0 tetex-bin mythflix
librpcsecgss2 libt1-5 libavahi-qt3-1 mythcontrols php4-common netpbm
libcdaudio1 libnetpbm10 mythweather liblua50 libg2c0 mythnews tex-common
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

So I ran 'apt-get autoremove' to correct.

Hmmm, at this point everything seems to be working except for httpd and all of its services (MythWeb, the wiki, etc). Poking around I quickly figured out Apache wasn't installed. So re-installing that came first:

#apt-get install apache2

When asked if I wanted to keep my current configuration file, I answered yes. At this point httpd was running and working, but my wiki, MythTV and phpadmin weren't. Next step was installing php and phymyadmin

#apt-get install php5
...
# apt-get install phpmyadmin

PHPMyAdmin working at this point at http://my.host.name/phpmyadmin/, so I turned my attention to installing MythWeb:

# apt-get install mythweb
Mythweb was now working at http://my.host.name/mythweb/

Back to installing mediawiki:

# apt-get install mediawiki

This installed version 1.7, but it still wasn't working. Looks like I had two installs (mediawiki and mediawiki1.7)? So I removed one:

# rm /etc/apache2/conf.d/mediawiki.conf

And restarted apache:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That did it. Browsing to http://my.host.name/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page resulted in a setup menu and a link to configure. I ran through the configuration -

And moved that configuration into place:

# mv /var/lib/mediawiki1.7/config/LocalSettings.php /var/lib/mediawiki1.7/LocalSettings.php

Now the only thing left was to re-secure the wiki.