The joy of upgrades

Linux 2 Minutes

I upgraded my PC at the weekend.

Being a Manjaro user, operating system upgrades are frequent, simple and speedy. Most of the time.

Because I never learn, I keep on buying HP computers.

In general, I like HP devices. They tend to be solidly constructed and nicely reliable. But the company does have a habit of using components — like network cards — that are not as well supported as they could be.

There was quite a lot to upgrade on Sunday, including a new Linux kernel. Upgrades tend to be simple and speedy these days, so I launched the upgrade, twiddled my thumbs for a couple of minutes and rebooted the PC.

No Wi-Fi Adapter Found

Yep. I managed to break my internet connection, much to the amusement of the rest of the family.

This hasn’t happened after an upgrade before but I did remember, from when I first set the thing up, that the problem is the Realtek wireless card. I just need, therefore, to identify the card, hop onto the Arch Wiki to determine which package and I need to install, and install it and the problem will be fixed.

Identifying the card is easy enough, but I will note it here for future reference: $ lspci -k | grep 'Wireless Network'

Getting to the wiki, and installing the package, is more problematic because I need an internet connection for this.

No Wi-Fi Adapter Found

Did I ever mention that the PC I have is a mini-tower with a massive monitor? It’s also in a different room to the modem and, as I discovered, I no longer have (or could find) a cable capable of reaching from one device to the other.

This is why I ended up spending a sizable chunk of my Sunday disassembling the PC, lugging it from one room to the other, and then putting it all back together again. This would have been annoying enough but, since we use Wi-Fi everywhere, the modem is neatly tucked away behind the TV. So I had disconnect all the devices attached to it in order to pull it out of it’s alcove and put it on the floor while not tripping over the cat.

Reinstalling the driver took less than five minutes and, after a quick reboot to confirm that all was okay, it was time to put everything back together.

This is the point at which the real crisis began. My partner realised that I’d managed to unplug (and lose the cable to) the set-top box.

We found it in the end and, for my next task, I need to relocate the stupidly long Ethernet cable that I used to keep around for situations such as this one.

Published by Paul

Reader of books, watcher of films, player of games. British father of three, now living in Belgium and making a living from building interfaces.

Published

7 thoughts on “The joy of upgrades”

    1. I think they were amused rather than impressed. 😉

      It’s not difficult to fix, apart from the fact that I need an internet connection in order to fix the fact that I don’t have an internet connection.

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  3. Oof! I hate “simple” computer problems because they never are. Is Manjaro better than Ubuntu? It’s kind of a casual question because I haven’t done a whole lot with Linux besides a dabble here or there.

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    1. I think “better” is the wrong question because it all depends on what you are looking for.

      Ubuntu is very stable, very reliable and once you’ve installed it you can pretty much forget about it. My kids all have Ubuntu installed on their laptops (the LTS version) and everything just works. The downside of only upgrading every two years is some of the software can start to get a bit old.

      Manjaro is based on Arch and follows a rolling release model. So rather than having to do one upgrade every two years, I have a constant stream of new stuff. The risk with constantly upgrading, of course, is that there is a greater risk of running into the sort of issue I encountered at the weekend.

      That said, Manjaro is normally very stable and issues like this are rare and becoming rarer.

      At the end of the day, there are many distributions all of which serve a different set of requirements. So it’s a case of figuring out what you want from a computer and then finding the distribution that best fits your requirements.

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