I spent the entire day today trying to install PostgreSQL with PostGIS support on my Ubuntu Linux server. (PostGIS will add features for geographic queries to PostgreSQL, but more about that later). Unfortunately my previous experience with Ubuntu had led me to believe that installing this PostGIS extension would be a breeze. Wrong. I spent all day trying to download, compile and install all of its dependencies… flex, libgeos, proj, etc. Even with the excellent instructions on the PostGIS site I never got it to install and actually work in PostgreSQL. But then the instructions said “At Version 6.10 of Ubuntu, using Postgresql 8.1, postgis is available using apt-get.”… OK, the prospect of being able to install this with one simple command was reason enough for me to upgrade my Ubuntu 6.06 installation to version 6.10.

But disaster didn’t really strike until after the hour and a half download and installation procedure. Ubuntu told me it was time to restart but after restarting I never got to see my desktop again. The GUI crashes with the message “Server Authorization directory (daemon/ServAuthDir) is set to /var/lib/gdm but this does not exist.”, but the problem is even far worse than that. The /home/ directory is completely empty, so all my files are gone, as well as other directories such as /var/lib and /var/spool. The current state of my server is so dire that it looks like I have no choice but to wipe everything clean and install Ubuntu 6.10 from scratch now.

Fortunately there wasn’t any personal data on there, other than the programs I had installed, but I should have done some reading before I tried this. As it turns out there are many other people for whom this upgrade ended in a nightmare as well. Aarrrrggh! I don’t like to complain about open source software because many Ubuntu developers work hard for the community, for little or no pay, but I think that at least a warning on the installation site would have been appropriate here.