Upgrade to Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04)

This Monday was a holiday here so I thought it might be a good time to upgrade my Linux, a couple of days before the official release. It took a long time to download all the updates, but it seemed to get everything and then started the installation process. I went inside to finish the last few episodes of Lost, I finally watched all 4 seasons of after beginning about a month ago. I have to say that the 4th season is a letdown so far. I mean seriously, you need to have an emotional "constant" for time travel? That really made me cringe, the writers need to stay as far away from math as possible.
When I came back to the computer to see how it was going I was at 1% and got an error already. I spent the rest of the night clicking "OK" buttons because it kept finding problems with the install. After a hundred of these it gave up and it quit the upgrade. But by that time, I had already started noticing that things had stopped working, like Gnome Nautilus, ugh.
So with some trepidation I rebooted the machine. I came back to a bash prompt and I was relieved! I realize, however, that any neophyte Linux user would have been terrified, but I was at home, I can work with this, the normal Linux commands were all there and my disk was fine.
I tried "sudo aptitude upgrade" and it had a lot of failures and suggested using "dpkg --configure -a" I tried that and also got a lot of errors.
Error messages are good, they point to something. In this case I saw that there were a lot of errors with OpenOffice. So I "sudo aptitude remove openoffice" and I gave a huge list of things it would also have to remove, I was getting somewhere! It removed openoffice successfully, I had also noticed some errors with timidity and solfege, so I removed them as well. More success.
Finally, I ran "sudo --configure -a" and it updated everything correctly and a reboot brought me back to gnome.

Except that it couldn't figure out my video settings and I was 800x600 pixel mode on only one monitor. This is better than things used to used to be say two versions ago with Ubuntu, before I would have been at the bash prompt again. I tried installing, one after another, the three versions of nvidia (nvidia-glx-new, nvidia-glx, and nvidia-glx-legacy) and none of them worked. I went to my normal saviour Alberto Milone's "Envy" and it wouldn't run under this version of Ubuntu. I looked at the site and, he has a new version called "Envy NG". I was a little nervous that the new version would not support my older video card, but a quick "sudo aptitude remove envy & sudo aptitude install envyng-gtk" and I gave it a go.
Envy saved the day again, worked flawlessly and my dual monitor setup was exactly the way it was before.
O happy times, now compiz also works like a champ and I'm back to work.

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