Tag: ubuntu

Upgrading Ubuntu To 18.04.3 LTS

Last Saturday I updated my virtual server from 16.04 LTS to 18.04.3 LTS. The upgrade took about an hour. It wasn’t too painful. I tried to use the maintainer’s configuration defaults wherever. Mostly it worked but I found a few problems I had to fix. The biggest problems I encountered from the upgrade were:

  1. My web pages were showing the PHP scripts rather than executing the script. Enabling PHP 7.2 in Apache2 solved that problem.
  2. In PHP 7.2 mcrypt is deprecated so it broke one of my applications. Since I did not set up my application to use encryption, the solution was to disable encryption in the application configuration.
  3. Every night I send myself a PERL report. The report complained about a missing module. So I installed the missing module into PERL using CPAN.
  4. A WordPress plugin complained about cURL was not installed. I installed php-curl using apt.

My Natty Narwhal problems

Last week I decided to update to the latest recent on my VMware version of the Ubuntu Desktop and it did not go well. During the upgrade I got a disk space error message with non-displayable characters. It was a curious message since I thought I had enough disk space and it did not stop the process. It was when I rebooted I encountered the major problem. I would like to tell you more about the error message but the screen clears and I am left with a GRUB prompt. That’s not nice!

So I did some research and booted using the instructions from this page, Express Boot to the Most Recent Kernel. Everything came up nicely except for my windows were missing the title bar when I came in via the NX client. To fix the booting problem, I reinstalled from the LiveCD using the simplest method. To fix the missing title bar I installed the latest version of NX client from NoMachine NX. I also got the missing title bar when I used the VMware console window to log in. In that case I just specified that I wanted to use the Classic interface when I logged in.