Upgrading Ubuntu The Shorter Way

Today I decided to upgrade my system from Feisty to Gutsy the next release of Ubuntu.

The normal way to do an Ubuntu upgrade from an old release to a new release is to edit the "/etc/apt/sources.list" then replace all old release name to the new release name in the file. Quiet tedious if you ask me, because if you've a long list in your sources.list file, then it means you are going to sit for quiet long to effect the changes.

For me if I'm using vim to edit the file, I do this :%s /search_text/replace_text/g to quickly do the find and replacement. After, I save the file and do the normal "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade", then get some coffee, watch it as it upgrades.Seems shorter eh?

Now I suffer no more long and tedious process, all I have to do, is just type these at the shell prompt.

  sudo sed -e 's/\ssearch_text/ replace_text/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get upgrade

As I'm blogging now, the upgrade is in progress.It is just sweet.I'm hoping nothing goes breaks though. Thanks to this post

I did a "man sed" to find about the "sed" command. sed is a stream editor for filtering and transforming text. It is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream. Notes taken from the man page. If you need more info about sed, then "man sed". If you know of any quicker way too, please include them as comment.

Ugly Resolution Sometimes In Ubuntu

Due to high cost of bandwidth here in Ghana, most of us don't have Internet at home so we do our Ubuntu installation where we have Internet( to get the latest packages ) and most of us uses Desktops.
In order for us to have Internet connection with our boxes, we have to carry them over to an Internet enabled environment, such as IT training institutes eg. aiti-kace, Internet cafes, etc and we don't carry our monitors along because they are too bloated and heavy to be carried over.

Due to this, we end up doing our installation without our own monitors but a different monitor. Installation at a different location goes very well and everything looks great. Now when we return home and fix our monitors to the boxes, we login and it happens that, our nice looking resolution on the other monitor has changed into a crappy resolution with our monitors. Everything on the screen looks so big and ugly that you can't even see some parts of programs opened. The zoom in level is too much to bear.

Okay story over, now to the solution. One will simply say, to solve such an issue you have to just go to Preferences->Screen Resolution to change to a different resolution but hey it's a big NO. You only see one resolution which means you've to stick to that resolution nothing else. Okay, we figured a way to solve it without tweaking the xorg.conf file, all you have to do is get a live Ubuntu cd, boot it, copy the xorg.conf file generated with the live cd, boot back to your installed Ubuntu, replace the xorg.conf file generated with the Ubuntu live cd with the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11/. After, restart X, login back and you should be smiling :-) again. I must say live cds are rescuers.

Now to the world, know of any other quick solution to this?