I had zero issues upgrading to Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole). That is all. 🙂

Seriously, this is the first upgrade since 18.10 (Cosmic) that I haven’t had a single post-upgrade issue (although 23.04 (Lunar) was close). The biggest change was the jump from the 6.8 kernel to 6.11. Maybe since 24.04 (Noble) was an LTS release there just weren’t that many changes for this upgrade cycle. Whatever the reason, I’m happy and upgraded.

Ok, can we get to the real reason for these bi-annual posts? Fall sports!

• Behind continued strong performances from Baker Mayfield (not to mention Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and the rest), the Bucs are tied with the Falcons for 1st place in the NFC South at 4-2 (one of those losses an OT stunner in Atlanta on Thursday Night Football the other week).
• Behind continued dismal performances from Deshaun Watson, the Browns sit last in the AFC North at 1-5 and are tied for last in the whole league with Carolina, Jacksonville, and New England (!!). The Browns also recently announced they are leaving downtown Cleveland for the suburbs and hope to build a new domed stadium facility for the 2029 season.
• The Rays also want to build a new stadium (and it’ll be interesting to see what happens now that Tropicana Field lost its roof during Hurricane Milton), but no post-season for them this year, the first time since 2018.
• The 2024 NBA season starts next week, so no Cavs news right now. Of course the big NBA story is Bronny James joining his dad Lebron on the Lakers.
• The Lightning are undeafeated (1 of just 3 unbeaten teams) at 3-0, but are in second place in the Atlantic division (and 7th overall) because of missed games due to Hurricane Milton. No Stamkos either. 🙁
• But the real news was the Guardians beat the Tigers in 5 games of the ALDS and advanced to face the Yankees in the ALCS. After dropping the first two games in New York, the Guardians came roaring back in Game 3 to tie the game with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th with a 2-run homer from “Big Christmas” Jhonkensy Noel and then won it with a walk-off 2-run homer from David Fry in the bottom of the 10th. Unfortunately, the Cleveland bullpen could not solve the riddle of New York’s sluggers and the Guardians lost the next two games in Cleveland and the series, 4 games to 1. But as usual I’m already looking forward to Spring Training next March!

Oh, Linux? Yeah, yeah … come back in April for 25.04, the Plucky Puffin, blah blah blah. 😉

Did everyone enjoy the solar eclipse last month? We didn’t get totality here but my family up in Cleveland sent some amazing pictures. The daily temps are creeping above 80 which means spring in Florida and that of course leads to my annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!

• the Cleveland Guardians are currently 1st in the AL Central (and 2nd in the league), sitting at 22-12, a nice hot start for the season that I hope they can keep up!
• unlike last year, the Tampa Bay Rays have started a little slowly at 17-18, in the bottom half of the AL East
• for the second year in a row the Cleveland Cavaliers are playing in the NBA playoffs: they just won their Round One series against the Orlando Magic in 7 games and move on to face the Boston Celtics. That’s the first playoff series win for the Cavs without Lebron James since 1993!
• the NFL Draft happened the other week, but both the Browns and Bucs had decent seasons last year and didn’t have any high picks so I didn’t really pay any attention to it (but the Bucs did manage to sign Baker Mayfield to a new 3-year contract, so there’s that!)
• and the Lightning? *sigh* After making it into the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the 7th year in a row (and the 10th time in past 11 years), riding on Nikita Kucherov’s record-setting season with 100 assists and 144 points, they fell to the Florida Panthers in 5 games (the first time the Panthers have won a playoff series against the Lightning). I was at Game 4 here in Tampa when the Bolts won 6-3 … was I watching Steven Stamkos skate on home ice in a Lightning sweater for the last time? I hope not!! It’s going to be a tough off-season …

Anyway, Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) was released late last month. Per the usual, I ran my pre-upgrade backup scripts and then sudo do-release-upgrade -d (once again needing the -d parameter otherwise no upgrade was found). It took the average 30 minutes to download and apply all the updated packages and then another 20 minutes or so for me to re-apply my affected changes to various config files. I ran into two problems this cycle:

• like with the 23.10 upgrade, PHP 8.2 was removed and replaced with PHP 8.3 and again the process removed the 8.2 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not re-install the corresponding 8.3 versions. This broke WordPress and my Piwigo photo gallery until I manually installed the two missing packages and restarted Apache. I take good notes during upgrades, though, so I was prepared to check on (and fix) this again.
• fail2ban “failed2start” (heh) with a ERROR No module named 'asynchat' error, but a quick Google search found the reported bug which pointed me to manually installing the latest 1.1.0 release, and that fixed the problem.

The latest 6.8 Linux kernel also fixed a problem I had just recently run into. I thought the latest release of Piwigo 14.4 had broken my Physical Photo Move extension (it was causing the Apache processes to completely lock up), but after digging into it more I tracked it down to a problem with a CIFS-related kernel patch in 6.5.0-28. I had since been running the reverted/patched 6.5.0-27 kernel from the PPA to fix this, but the problem was also resolved (or never existed) in the 6.8 tree.

See you back here in October for … Oracular Oriole!