Beware Tomcat5.5 in Feisty Fawn

I moved to the newest version of Ubuntu over the weekend: Feisty Fawn. I was having troubles getting my wireless working (Intel PRO/Wireless 3945) and I had heard it works in Feisty. The upgrade, um, took out my system. Yep. Everything was chugging along just fine until it tried to upgrade Tomcat and then I got a cryptic error message saying the update had failed and I should email them. No real indication of what to do next. So I tried to get the upgrade running again, but I'm not savvy enough with the Linux. Tried to restart the machine... Big mistake. Not so much with the booting. So I had to wipe that partition and reinstall. I didn't lose anything except time.

Then today when I was setting up my machine I couldn't get Tomcat5.5 to work (we use SOLR which uses Tomcat behind the scenes for fast searching). Lost more time trying to figure out what was wrong. Finally I thought maybe Aptitude's version was bad, so I removed it and got Tomcat straight from Apache. Everything works fine now. So if you're moving from Edgy to Feisty, maybe should remove Tomcat from the package management before upgrading.

Good news is that my wireless works now. Long way to go, however.

Comments

KetanPadegaonkar said…
It's always a good idea to download the JVM and tomcat from the original sources.

Some folks at the TW Pune office have smoothly migrated to 7.04 and had no issues with getting wi-fi up and running.
May 1, 2007 at 11:25 PM
Unknown said…
Tomcat problem is described here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomcat5.5/+bug/97096
May 8, 2007 at 2:44 PM
Shlomo said…
Jake,

I agree with ketan. If you are going to do java developer type tasks, you should never use your package manager to supply you with your java tools. Package managers have "standard" places of putting things because they want to ensure there are no duplicate libraries on your system, however you have to give up control over things like your classpath and other such javaness. It becomes a nightmare. Just try getting eclipse and then install some plugins. You will be unhappy.

As for fixing a non-booting linux install. That is usually pretty easy. Grab your trusty boot disk (the ubuntu installer for example) and boot from that. Then you can mount your busted partition and go look at your system's logs. Find out what it was choking on and fix it. Then reboot. I know it sounds crazy, but most of the time if you read those system logs and something is REALLY wrong you will figure it out. Seriously. Read the logs. :)
May 30, 2007 at 3:29 PM
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