A new lead for my tablet situation?

[Tetsuwan Penguin]

I think the following two commands will upgrade the kernel and provide the new drivers:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic-lts-raring
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic-lts-raring

Am I correct, Diehard67?

[diehard67]

actually kubuntu 14.04 has the drivers new enough for her tablet, I just looked

that would upgrade her to the 13.04 kernel but that is still not new enough for her stuff to work, even 13.10 doesn't support it yet, I looked at the usb ids supported by the driver on my laptop

so that said, the best option I think is to wate for the 14.04 upgrade to hit and upgrade, you should get a prompt when the release is available and it will walk you threw the upgrade process, but not as much console output to watch, though I think when it gets to the installing software part you can expand a terminal window in the upgrade window and watch it go.

[Little Brown Fox]

I'm... still confused, but... maybe I'll wait...

(I really, really don't want to, since a lot of people didn't wait for theirs... I kind of need it, like, now, because I'm stressed and I want to get this horrible mess straightened out and done with...)

[Tetsuwan Penguin]

If I were her I would still backup my /home/<username> directory before doing the upgrade. The laptop does have a DVD-rom/CDRW drive in it, but I don't know how many blank CD's she'd need. It's easy enough to use K3B to burn the disks, but would take a while to manually drag and drop all the files into projects to burn.

There might be a script that would automate that, and compress the backup as well.

I do my backups with a USB connected external hard disk (not often enough!).
One of these days I need to build a NAS drive server with raid.

[diehard67]

I have a ceagate central nas, it does the job, but paitance is a virtue lol

and your right, regular backups are a must, and external harddrives are not expensive and is the best option.

the nas would be epic overkill for fox's one little computer though.

to head off some fear she may have, the upgrade process is little different then the upgrade command I told her yesterday, it is just pulling from a different repo, existing settings and data are preserved and the partitions do not get reformatted.

but a good backup solution is a good idea.

btw I recommend against using usb flash sticks for backup, there not reliable or big enough.

there grate for sneakernet though lol

[Little Brown Fox]

I don't have anything to back anything up onto. And I don't have any money to buy one. Any money. At all.

[Tetsuwan Penguin]

One thing you CAN do is to sign up for a free account on BOX. You can backup to the 'cloud'. I think they give you 1GB free.

[Little Brown Fox]

But that's not enough!

[diehard67]

backing up is just a good idea, I have upgraded countless times and not lost so much as 1 byte of any data, sometimes I may have to redo the odd system customization made by editing by hand a config file but that is about it, you should have no trouble upgrading, if it asks you something it should be a no brainier or close to it to pick the right answer but likely the upgrade will just do it's thing and a while later you will be asked to reboot and your done, at worst it will inform you that third party repos have been disabled, but re enabling them is not hard if this happens I can help you to correct that, the upgrade should not brake anything, even if it did disable a few ppas. just keep an eye out for an affordable backup solution, like an external harddrive, no mad dog rush to get one but the sooner the better.

like I said, the upgrade just upgrades all the individual software packages to the newest versions in the repo for the new version of kubuntu, the settings and user data are left alone, somethings that use databases may re wright the database in the new format but they migrate the data from the old one so nothing breaks.

we are probably making it seem scarier then it is but it is more or less the same as installing security updates, unless your computer looses power when installing the upgraded boot loader your not likely to have any trouble other then finding something to do while waiting for the looooooooooong upgrade process to finish. lol

[Little Brown Fox]

I still don't understand. And anyways, if other people are getting their tablets to work just fine with relatively simple measures, regardless, then why shouldn't I be able to? And you have yet to tell me how to actually upgrade in terms that I can understand. Basically, if it can't be done through the terminal, which seems to run everything on its own with minimal to no assistance, then I probably can't do it. At all. I can't do anything if it isn't mostly automatic- hence most of my problems with the tablet in the first place...