I swore I was done with Ubuntu upgrades after Quantal Quetzal. Hell, I think I even swore off Ubuntu back at 11.10 aka Oneiric Ocelot. Well look again, because here I am doing one last one. One last final review of a Ubuntu upgrade, which brought us to 13.04 aka Raring Ringtail.

Anyway, we used to all make this big joke after every update. Ok, it was just me. Something would always break horribly after an Ubuntu upgrade. Sort of the way that you’d wait for the Blue Screen of Death on reboot after some Windows update/upgrade back in the day, but I digress.

With Ubuntu, there were some classics. Remember the old “no network after upgrade“? Or the now classic, no wireless after upgrade. We wrote about the solution and it was surprising just how many people were affected by it, and how it persisted through so many versions. It was almost like you had to go through the no wireless thing as a kind of Ubuntu upgrade rite of passage or something. Great memories.

So, we saw the chance to upgrade to Raring Ringtail this morning, and jumped on it. It took forever. And when I say forever, I mean fucking forever. One reason was the usual “do you want to keep this version of /etc/whatever” and the upgrade won’t continue until you answer the question. And I wasn’t even home to click it. Fine, that was my fault. Still. It was long. Very long.

Finally, after another hour, it was done. Reboot, looks fine. New features, not really interested since I ditched the whole Unity thing back in 11.04. Oh yeah, soon after the post upgrade reboot the following vague ass error message appeared: “System program problem detected. Do you want to report the problem now?” Your choices: Press Cancel or Report. I pressed cancel, preferring to get on with my life, which usually means getting some work done, or get started on that Lentil Soup recipe while listening to music.

Listening to music, huh? Wait a second…

Where’s the sound??

WHY IS THERE NO SOUND

Turns out this is a thing. Yes, no sound post Ubuntu upgrade. And now we have to fix it. Bravo guys. It’s 2013, you know.

Finding a solution to the no sound problem was pretty quick since numerous people have been having this issue. This worked for me, so use at your own risk (although this is some low risk shit right here)

First, uninstall pulse audio and also-base like so:

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio

Then re-install pulse audio and also-base:

 sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio

Then reload the mess:

sudo alsa force-reload

BOOM. Audio. Time for some soup.

Update: Since installing and running Ubuntu 13.04, we’ve seen the system hang on shutdown no less than 5 times. Also, booting up sometimes gets interrupted by a boot menu and I have to select ‘Ubuntu’ to continue. This should be automatic obviously.
And, that No Audio problem that we fixed above? The problem is back. Long story short, we’re going to ditch Ubuntu alltogether. Fixing this kind of shit is so 2002.

Update II – Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) will be released on 10/17/2013 and it looks like we’re going to avoid it. Fedora project all the way!