Ubuntu 10.4 "Good Buddy" has been out for a while, so I thought I'd upgrade one of my systems to give it a try. Not one of my better ideas. I backed up one of my Fit PC 1s with my bare metal recovery scripts. And a good thing, too.
I read the support information on the Fit PC support pages. While there was no driver for other models, the docs were silent on video support for the Fit-PC 1. So I decided to brave the hazards and upgrade from 9.10. The upgrade went fine until the software queried what to do about replacing a configuration file. I did what I needed to do (via ssh), and gave a keystroke to the software. No response. While the system was running and reacting to my ssh log in, the GUI had locked up.
Rebooting produced an unholy mess.
I decided to try a minimal installation. This produces a command line only installation, which bypasses the video driver issue temporarily. That worked pretty well. At one point the installer had problems pulling in some updates. When that eventually timed out, I told it to ignore the updates and proceed. It eventually finished, and I had a nice non-GUI minimal installation.
Adding GDM and X was a mistake. Ludicrous Lynx boots immediately into some graphical thing that covers over the usual boot messages. I want to see those boot messages, especially on a first boot! Anyway, on boot the video simply went away, leaving a very nice blank screen. Nice or not, that isn't what I wanted.
I am now re-installing Ubuntu 9.10, which has its own problems. But the minimal installation is definitely something to keep in mind for future efforts.
The Ubuntu folks seem bound and determined to add new features (therefor new bugs) as quickly as possible without fixing old ones. I am beginning to think I should move the Fit-PCs to Debian stable. That's a thought that bears pondering.