I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, and everything seemed to be extremely smooth and painless.

However, a day or two later I suddenly noticed that the fan of my Ubuntu laptop (a Dell Latitude D630) was blowing like hell — the machine had stalled, I couldn’t wake up the desktop again, the screen remained black… I think the hang occurred after I had installed the first updates after upgrading to 13.04… Anyway, I had to hard-reboot the box… And this is when the trouble started… 🙁

Dunno what exactly happened, but the first thing I noticed was boot issues, something like “Cannot mount /boot; ext2: no such filesystem” or something close to that. And indeed the kernel in Ubuntu 13.04 seems to lack support for that admittedly ancient filesystem (cat /proc/filesystems). I fixed that by creating a journal on my /boot filesystem as follows (obviously if you have similar issues, you need to substitute your actual UUID in the command below), thereby migrating the filesystem to ext3:

sudo tune2fs -j UUID=b8ad9dbd-a514-46c8-86af-d2a9cafe3d0c

I also had to update /etc/fstab accordingly, of course:

UUID=b8ad9dbd-a514-46c8-86af-d2a9cafe3d0c /boot           ext3    defaults        0       2

Next thing I noticed that a couple of devices suddenly didn’t work: The touchpad, the touchpoint, my WiFi interface, etc. I quickly found out that obviously the modules required to support the devices weren’t loaded, and it was due to missing/broken modules dependencies. The following file which keeps those dependencies

/lib/modules/3.8.0-19-generic/modules.dep.bin

was truncated (size of 0 bytes).

So I removed it and recreated it by

sudo depmod -a

After I rebooted everything seemed to be fine again.

I hope that this concludes my negative experiences with 13.04, and that the laptop will runs as rock solid again as it used to be under 12.10.