Upgrading to Ubuntu 21.10, Impish Indri

Apparently an Indri is a kind of lemur.

I’d already done the upgrade on a couple of other machines without any problem, decided it was time for it on my main (office desktop) box.

This time there were issues – it said it hadn’t completed. But keeping going at apt upgrade (and whatever else it suggested) without rebooting got there eventually. There were a few mystery segfaults along the way. Here’s that part of my history :

1964 sudo do-release-upgrade
1965 sudo apt update
1966 sudo apt upgrade
1967 sudo do-release-upgrade
1968 sudo apt upgrade
1969 sudo apt --fix-broken install
1970 sudo apt update
1971 sudo apt upgrade
1972 sudo dpkg --configure -a
1973 sudo apt upgrade
1974 sudo apt --fix-broken install
1975 sudo apt upgrade
1976 sudo apt --fix-broken install
1977 sudo apt autoremove
1978 sudo apt upgrade
1979 sudo apt update
1980 sudo apt upgrade

One thing I’d forgotten about is that the USB WiFi dongle needed a driver. First I tried suggestions for getting proprietary drivers through Settings, but it said none were available.

Luckily I had a Cat5 cable at hand, so went into the modem that way.

I’ve upgraded a couple of times since getting this machine without having to think about the driver. lsusb told me –

Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0bda:b812 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL88x2bu [AC1200 Techkey]

Googling led me to the Driver for rtl88x2bu wifi adaptors github repo.

It didn’t work right away so I tried a few suggestions from here and here.

Following this gave me Wifi but when I rebooted it’d gone, so I had to do the DKMS thing.

This is that part of the history :

1981 lsusb
1982 cd Downloads/
1983 git clone https://github.com/cilynx/rtl88x2bu.git
1984 ls rt*
1985 cd rtl88x2bu
1986 make
1987 insmod 88x2bu.ko
1988 sudo insmod 88x2bu.ko
1989 sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/modules/uname -r/vmlinux.xz /boot/
1990 sudo insmod 88x2bu.ko
1991 make
1992 sudo insmod 88x2bu.ko
1993 sudo modprobe cfg80211
1994 sudo insmod 88x2bu.ko
1995 cd Downloads/
1996 ls
1997 cd rtl88x2bu/
1998 ls
1999 ./deploy.sh

Overall, relatively painless, seems to be working a treat now.