I think it might have been something to do with a video card but I’ve never had a lot of luck messing around with anything related to graphics. The system was continually locking up: i.e. display frozen with an unresponsive mouse and keyboard leaving me with one option: hard reset the system. It was really frustrating, and a fresh install from CD (originally I had used the Update Manager) didn’t seem to resolve the issues. I couldn’t find anything in the release notes but I could have missed it.

Anyway, I really need my PC to be working right now, so I was going to revert to 8.10. I didn’t have an 8.10 install CD available so I downloaded the current 8.04 ISO and made a new CD from that. I moved my PC to another location where I could use a faster Internet connection and other computers to burn the CDs and got 8.04 up and running. At the other location, I had statically configured the network IP address via Network Manager. For reasons I don’t understand very well that appears to have cause a broken Network Manager once I had completed the upgrade to 8.10. The network connection worked but Network Manager had no defined connections (“No valid active connections found!”) and would not take over management when I defined one through the applet.

I found some threads on the Ubuntu Forums but still wasn’t getting anywhere. I also found this bug in Launchpad. I’m comfortable with Linux but not an expert by any means so it took me a while to resolve the issue. In the end I commented out any reference to eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces, purged Network Manager (apt-get purge network-manager), and rebooted my computer. Then I reinstalled network-manager and rebooted again. Might not be exactly the right procedure but it seemed to work. Just making changes to the configuration files and logging off and back on didn’t work. Doing that caused other problems like not being able to launch the Terminal app.

The whole process was made more frustrating because now I have to reinstall and reconfigure many of the bits and pieces of my working environment (apache, vmware, etc). I also accidentally deleted my archive of podcasts and downloads somewhere along the line. Obviously, that’s not all the result of trying to install Jaunty but it does more or less guarantee I won’t be trying the upgrade again.