Upgrading from Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" to "Intrepid Ibex" wasn't the smooth ride I was used to. I'm a pretty happy Ubuntu user and my system (an old Acer Travelmate 291) has been running all Ubuntu releases since "Breezy Badger" without a single reinstall. This time, however, I experienced problems with WLAN, sound, battery status display, and postfix SASL authentification.

Since "Hardy" is a "long term support" release, the update manager doesn't announce the availability of the "Intrepid" release. You first have to go to "System / Administration / Software Sources" and in the "Updates" tab change "Long term support releases only" to "Normal releases". Then the update manager will display the "Update" button.

After the update, kernel 2.6.25 was installed. Since WLAN and sound didn't work, I upgraded to 2.6.27 which was also available but things didn't improve. A look at dmesg(1) showed that the firmware for my ipw2100 chip wasn't found. I installed the linux-firmware package and things worked again.

Sending mail didn't work because postfix wasn't able to authenticate to my provider's SMTP server. Nothing in the logs pointed to the exact problem, but after re-generating all .db-Files in /etc/postfix/ using sudo postmap hash:filename mysteriously solved the problem.

Maybe my system is showing its age and has accumulated too much cruft over the years. Or maybe I shouldn't update my system so soon after a new release ...