Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

My box was running Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal for quite a long time because I was too lazy to upgrade it so recently I had to go through hella lot of upgrades to catch up with the latest technologies :P

The upgrade to 13.04 Raring Ringtail was quite smooth but while I was upgrading to 13.10 Saucy Salamander my laptop was overheating and shut down without a warning (they seriously should give us like 10 seconds to do something first). And that marked the beginning of hell :P

After powering on, Ubuntu couldn't start because of broken packages, but luckily there was no problem with the kernel and it only took me a bit to play around with the recovery menu to get the packages rebuilt.

However because the installation was incomplete there were many features missing and since there was no easy way to get them installed I decided to go a bit further to upgrade to the development version 14.04 Trusty Tahr.

Unsurprisingly, I was caught up in a serious sendmail bug - the installation went into an infinite loop. The bug was said to have been fixed a few months ago, but I don't know for which reason the fix hasn't made it to the Ubuntu repository yet. There was a workaround mentioned in the bug report, but the whole thing was a mess, and someone even suggested something as complicated as modifying the installation package. After some time reading all the available solutions, I got it done in a simple way. Just look for update_db in /usr/share/sendmail/ and replace the following lines:

str=$(echo "$line" | cut -d " " -f 1);
line=$(echo "$line" | cut -d " " -f 2-);

with

str=$(echo "$line" | head -n 1);
line=$(echo "$line" | tail -n +2);

and after that do a

sudo dpkg --configure -a

to reconfigure the packages :P

The Ubuntu team name their releases after the letters of the alphabet, and they already reached T. I wonder what will happen in a few years when all are used up :P