Trouble with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Over the last few days I have upgraded my family's computers from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04.   I had been getting a bit over-confident at how good Ubuntu was, and so was not really worried about things going wrong during the upgrade, as I would have been in the past - it had been getting to the state that it 'just worked'.   So I made the mistake of doing the upgrade over a weekend when we were particularly busy, which meant it was a particular pain when things went wrong.   The issues we have had are:

1. Our PackardBell OneTwo was un-useable - booted to a black screen - didn't have chance to work out why so I just saved some logs to report the bug later, and re-installed 11.10.
2. My home server (my old Fujitsu Amilio laptop) appeared to upgrade without problems...but every time I tried to access it, it was dead.   I think it was suspending, even though I had set the power settings to never suspend.   Have tried leaving the lid open, with me logged in, with the screen blanked - seemed to be working when I left - need to work out what was going on there....

Disk Crash on Linux

Well, I thought that the introduction of the ext3 (and higher) file systems had stopped all of the problems of disk crashes and mangled filesystems on linux.
But, after a few years of reliable operation the root filesystem on my home server (my old Fujitsu Siemens laptop) seems to have mangled.
The symptoms were....not booting - you get the 'Starting up......' message during boot then the system appears to hang.  But if you listen carefully you hear that the disk is actually doing something.  So I left it for a few hours.....
When I came back to it there was a 'failed to mount /dev/sda1' type error message, with an option to skip mounting or manually fix it.
I went for manually fixing it, because not mounting the root filesystem will not get me very far.
This dropped me into a single user shell.
I ran fsck and it said that an Inode has illegal blocks.  I selected the option to clear them...and again said yes when it asked me again.
It then said it was restarting e2fsck from the beginning, and spent quite a few minutes checking....

Then at Pass 2 fsck said it had found a deleted or unused inode.  Again I said 'y' to the 'Clear?' question....
Then lots of offers to fix things (to the extent that I just held my finger on the 'y' key...)

Then fsck announced that it was complete and I should re-boot linux.   Re-ran fsck and it announced that /dev/sda1 was clean, so re-booted.....but booting is taking a suspiciously long time.....like it has been trying for 10 minutes and hasn't got past the boot up splash screen...I'm going to need a plan B...

Well, I don't know what the problem is.   Tried booting off a USB memory stick, and the disk checks ok and mounts, but the boot process just hangs.   I decided I had spent too long on this so it is currently installing Ubuntu 10.10 on the disk instead, so can't try any more diagnosis!

More Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I 'accidentally' wrecked my gnome desktop (no menus, toolabrs etc.) - I had been doing a bit of tidying up and must have uninstalled something important. I could not decide what, so re-installed the whole ubuntu-desktop package.
This came with pulseaudio again, so sound stopped working like last time.
Decided to invest an hour in sorting it. No real success searching on the web, but I did find this article - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=962695. The author provided a little script to update the ALSA drivers automatically, and quite a few people reported that this cured the sound for them.

I am always wary about running unknown programs as root, but the script looked safe enough - just an automated way of downloading the ALSA source packages and running 'make install' etc. so I trusted it.
It ran and it installed ALSA 1.0.20, compared to version 1.0.18 in the Ubuntu package.
To my surprise, when I re-booted the computer, sound is back!

More Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I 'accidentally' wrecked my gnome desktop (no menus, toolabrs etc.) - I had been doing a bit of tidying up and must have uninstalled something important. I could not decide what, so re-installed the whole ubuntu-desktop package.
This came with pulseaudio again, so sound stopped working like last time.
Decided to invest an hour in sorting it. No real success searching on the web, but I did find this article - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=962695. The author provided a little script to update the ALSA drivers automatically, and quite a few people reported that this cured the sound for them.

I am always wary about running unknown programs as root, but the script looked safe enough - just an automated way of downloading the ALSA source packages and running 'make install' etc. so I trusted it.
It ran and it installed ALSA 1.0.20, compared to version 1.0.18 in the Ubuntu package.
To my surprise, when I re-booted the computer, sound is back!

Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I upgraded my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 a few days ago.
Everything worked fine except for sound. Sound went from working perfectly in 8.10 to being quiet, and awfully crackly in 9.04.
If I updated the gnome settings to use OSS rather than ALSA it worked ok, except flash movies still made crackly noises (I don't think flash can use OSS).
I messed about with the gnome mixer without luck, except I did notice that changing the PCM volume did nothing (which is wrong), but changing the 'beep' volume did alter the sound volume (Along with crackles).
I don't know why the beep and PCM are the wrong way around, and don't have time to work out how sound works properly, so I went for brute force and ignorance - I had heard a suggestion that Pulseaudio might be the problem, so I replaced pulseaudio with esound, and it all seems to work now...
Therefore, I don't know what the problem was, but it was cured by getting rid of pulseaudio...

Ubuntu 9.04 Sound Problems

I upgraded my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 a few days ago.
Everything worked fine except for sound. Sound went from working perfectly in 8.10 to being quiet, and awfully crackly in 9.04.
If I updated the gnome settings to use OSS rather than ALSA it worked ok, except flash movies still made crackly noises (I don't think flash can use OSS).
I messed about with the gnome mixer without luck, except I did notice that changing the PCM volume did nothing (which is wrong), but changing the 'beep' volume did alter the sound volume (Along with crackles).
I don't know why the beep and PCM are the wrong way around, and don't have time to work out how sound works properly, so I went for brute force and ignorance - I had heard a suggestion that Pulseaudio might be the problem, so I replaced pulseaudio with esound, and it all seems to work now...
Therefore, I don't know what the problem was, but it was cured by getting rid of pulseaudio...