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Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare"
Reports are flooding in to Ubuntu's Installation & Upgrades forum from people having myriad problems with their upgrades. One user described it as a 'nightmare.' Users are producing detailed descriptions of problems but getting little help. This thread has mixed reports and is possibly the most interesting read. Many people report that straightforward upgrades of relatively mundane systems go well, but anything the least bit interesting seems not to have been accounted for, like software RAID, custom kernels, and Opera. Even the official upgrade method doesn't work for everyone, including crashes of the upgrade tool in the middle of installing, leaving systems unbootable, no longer recognizing devices (like the console keyboard!), reduced performance, X server crashes, wireless networking problems, the user password no longer working, numerous broken applications, and many even stranger things. Some of this is fairly subjective, with Kubuntu being a bit more problematic than Ubuntu, with reports that Xubuntu seems to have the worst problems, and remote upgrades are something you don't even want to try. Failed upgrades invariably require a complete reinstall. The conclusion from the street, about upgrading to Edgy, is a warning: If you're going to try to take the plunge, be sure to make a backup image of your boot partition before starting the upgrade. Your chances of having the upgrade be a total failure are high. If you're really dead-set on upgrading, you'll save yourself a lot of time and headache by backing up all of your personal files manually and doing a fresh install (don't forget to save your bookmarks!).
I've done a fresh install of edgy on my laptop and the network device does not get set up. Previously with dapper it was fine. I now have to do "sudo dhclient eth0" manually. I can't really complain though, since I haven't even raised it as a bug yet.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
http://blog.hulboj.org/2006/10/windows_bad_linux_b ad.html
Even had to use the force (dpkg)...
use gentoo and never do another dist upgrade again
I upgraded about 10 boxes or so from Dapper to Edgy - mostly Kubuntu, though, but in various stages of progress for Edgy's release cycle sind Knot 1 - (Edgy is a really nice distro at last, Dapper held many more small annoyances for me, personally) via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/" /etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`) and had no problems whatsoever. In fact, everything worked out a lot smoother than I had expected. So it may have been "a nightmare" _for some_ (how can upgrading a BROWSER turn out a nightmare? At least when there's a working functional equivalent still left on the box...), but upgrading to Edgy is not a nightmare _in general._
Give it a try, I say. You won't be dissappointed.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
And it went horribly wrong. I have an ATI card with the ATI driver installed via easyubuntu. After the upgrade, X just died saying the ati driver failed to start. My wireless wasn't working, either, so I couldn't get on google via lynx to research it. I ended up reinstalling dapper from CD, then doing the edgy upgrade straight away, and it was fine.
Users are producing detailed descriptions of problems but getting little help
I remember rushing to try XGL and Compiz the day they were released, and getting nowhere. About a week later the smart people who do such things had figured it out, and I was able to run it, but it was still pretty 'hardcore' and prone to breakage. About three weeks later it was simple.
Don't upgrade on the first day and expect things to go smoothly. You can only be as good as your last RC, and not enough people upgrade them to be able to find all the bugs. Wait a week and then answers will have been found for all the common problems.
Open source is crying out for more QA people. All you have to do is report a bug, or help by triaging the bugs that are there. It's a contribution that almost anyone can make.
My laptop upgrade went well, but of course successful upgrades don't make up a story.
However, when I tried to get Beryl working, X got broken and I had to reconfigure it manually. I blame it on Nvidia for not opening up the source though. Kudos to everyone involved in Ubuntu, you did a great job!
Res publica non dominetur
Since when has there ever been any expectation of anything but the most vanilla install of any Linux distro been expected to go correctly? The key to handling these things is a careful partitioning of file systems such that data is untouched by upgrade processes and a strong enough understanding of how the necessary services/programs are configured and interact with other core applications. If you find that you have a neither of these requirements handled it should be common knowledge that your experience with upgrading (or even running) linux will be troublesome in more then 50% of the cases regardless of what distro you use.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Going from 6.06 to 6.10 was pretty messy on PowerPC (not that I Was surprised - it's a small platform that doesn't get as much QA work) and it did require a complete reinstall. Qtparted seemed to be the source of about 90% of the problems.
:)
On the other hand I was *really* pleased when it was installed. The fresh install was trivially easy and everything works - including wireless with WPA and 3D acceleration. It's about the first time my laptop has been 100% usable as a laptop since I dumped OS X.
So: Minus one point for not upgrading properly. Plus several hundred points for maturity of hardware support. I'm sure that for 7.04 upgrades will be running perfectly
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
yes ..i completely understand the pain of truth
Upgrading from Kubuntu dapper using s/dapper/edgy/g
Ok People, you waited this long for Edgy Eft.. You surely can wait a few weeks longer till they get these upgrade issues sorted out. In the meantime, feel free to use the Edgy LiveCD.
Personally, I wouldn't risk upgrading my Dapper installation just yet. Rather, I would either install from scratch, or wait for these issues to be worked out
YahmaProxyStorm - An Apache based anonymous proxy service for security minded individuals.
I've only had a few problems when I upgraded:
The update gave up during the installation so I had to run apt-get dist-upgrade again.
A few packages were held back, namely Amarok, mplayer and python-*
I lost direct rendering on my ATI card. I fixed this though by adding
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "0"
EndSection
To my xorg.conf and rebooting
On the plus side, I now have Firefox 2 (which does crash, but that's the fault of the extensions I run) and I don't have to use
acpi=off
to my boot config anymore, which I had to do with Dapper. So now I can shutdown my pressing the power button.
Part of me wishes I hadn't upgraded (mainly because I didn't really benefit), but it's certainly not a "nightmare"
Summation 2
Can't speak for anybody else but the upgrade worked perfectly for me. Slightly troubling to see the download speed decrease from 200kb/s down to 55kb/s because the release was Slashdotted midway through my upgrade but I got through it. Perhaps the servers timed out for some and caused problems.
I must have really lucked out. Usually with linux and me, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. However, I've upgraded my desktop workstation and my development server (both running ubuntu, very different setups though) and both have been seamless.
Believe with me, my saplings.
use gentoo and never do another dist upgrade again
By the time gentoo is done compiling ubuntu will have released another version with all the bugs fixed.
Total failure for me trying to upgrade Kubuntu from Dapper to Edgy. Four attempts and I gave up - I'm really glad I have backups of all my partitions otherwise I'd have been stuffed.
/etc/apt/sources.list and pulling in new packages to do it from a console session rather than in X; when my screensaver kicked in it was impossible to get back by putting in the password because it couldn't recognise it (fortunately I could SSH in from my Zaurus and kill the process.)
I'd certainly advise anybody who intends to try upgrading by editing
Coming on the heels of the recent X server upgrade débacle, this has got me wondering if I should try another distro, which is disappointing as I like Mark Shuttleworth's attitude.
The problems will all be fixed on Patch Tuesday.
Summation 2
But yea, I upgraded at Knot 1 and have been doing dist-upgrades ever since. The only problem I ever encountered was when I installed xgl/compiz on Knot 3 - then I had some issues when I upgraded to RC1. I went through a purged XGL/Compiz from the system and everything was right back on track. I updated to the final release on day 1 and had no problems.
But as someone else said, upgrades that went smoothly aren't exactly the story, so... just my 2 cents.
Oddly I know of quite a few people who are planning on dumping Gentoo and switching to Ubuntu. The main reason is the pain of switching "profiles", which is not really supported in Gentoo and can be considered the same as a dist upgrade. The recent modular X headache is another reason, especially when it forces a profile switch to avoid a broken system.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I just did an upgrade from Dapper to Edgy (this was the first article I saw after the upgrade). The only problem I had was with xorg not upgrading I had to manually apt-get remove xserver-xorg-core before continuing with the upgrade for it to work for me. This was relatively easy for me to fix but I would imagine that others with less apt command line experience than I have would have found it very stressful.
Gentoo was an even bigger nightmare of manual updating of configuration scripts and bizarre breakages whenever I would do updates. Don't even get me started.
I just finished mine. Last night, I opened a terminal box in Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS and typed:
sudo update-manager -c
entered my password, said yes at the "Really update right now?" prompt, and went to bed.
Woke up fifteen minutes ago, rebooted the box, and came up in Edgy Eft/6.10. Even handled daylight savings time along the way.
Everything I typically use (Firefox, Thunderbird, XMMS, Pan, etc) seems to be working fine. I have a pretty typical installation though (i386-class desktop, wired ethernet, nVidia card).
So I opened Firefox, brought up Slashdot, and this was the top story, wouldn't you know...
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
I had a similar experience. Fortunately my upgrading tool somewhere close to the "cleaning up" process. After rebooting I had to update some packages manually over Synaptic, but the system ran fine, except for the fact that it somehow enabled Australian English as my default language.
And for another thing: Whatever I tried, I couldn't get the fglrx driver (that proprietary ATI driver) to work. The kernel module and the driver was properly installed, but nevertheless, I couldn't use Direct Rendering, although it was initialized properly, too. After a while I decided to download the Edgy installation CD and install this bitch from scratch. When inserting it, Ubuntu recognized a distribution upgrade on it and performed it. Well, the only thing it did was removing an old mesa driver, but after the "upgrade" was finished, everything started working perfectly fine. Including the fglrx driver.
By the way: The system sometimes seems to disable the wireless connection for no reason at all. Check your networking preferences, if it doesn't work.
Huge changes in the system are very likely to spark a lot of problems, the easiest way to overcome this is to to upgrade a few packages at a time, for example by keeping your system up to date with the unstable release.
:)
That's why my system is sync'd with unstable more-or-less every few days. I'm a Debian user, but I suppose this would apply to Ubuntu too.
While working on my phd I stopped doing that for a few months and the when I dist-upgraded again I had to do some real magic to avoid massive problems (like the python transition that tried to uninstall most of my python software)
Under some conditions it is safer to run unstable every day than to upgrade to a whole new release every 6 months.
On a side note apt developers could try to make "dist-upgrade" more similar to a day-by-day upgrade than to a single massive "apt-get install", trying to keep track of what package affect what other with every new version and than try to use all the information to recognize an update path that could be longer than the "massive install" but safer.
Well this doesn't even sound simple on paper, implementation would probably be a nightmare
I'm really getting annoyed by this.
In my experience upgrading works like a charm. Now this doesn't mean that it works for anybody of course, but reading those blogs and forum posts it's clear that most of the problems are homemade.
For one, people simply don't use the official way to update their system. Instead they blindly edit their sources.list, then run into problems and take hours and hours to complain about them on their blogs and in forums when all they had to do was take the 10 seconds it takes to read the instructions.
Further, most of the problems occur because people blindly installed outside, unstable packages without knowing what they were doing or being able to fix the problems that might occur.
Just think of all the people that used XGL, AIGLX, compiz, etc on dapper.
The reason I think the upgrade disasters happened is because most developers have been upgrading gradually, over time, just like me. After the release, they assumed upgrading works fine and focused most of the testing on fresh installs. This left the situation of a sudden dist-upgrade from Dapper to Eft un-tested.
In general testing upgrades is pretty difficult. One has to account for X possible previous versions (Dapper, Hoary, Breezy along with mixed software from universe repositories installed by hand) times Y possible hardware configurations. This results in a lot of testing scenarios....
My other take on the situation is that a lot more people are upgrading and therefore there is a total increase in upgrade problems. A year or more ago, there weren't that many Breezy users who upgraded to Dapper (just because there weren't that many Ubuntu users). Now there are a lot more users --- a lot more upgrades --- a lot more upgrade problems.
I just moved my bitchbox over from XP to Ubuntu Server because I wanted to learn how to use Linux. Specifically, I wanted to start with the bare essentials and install shit as I needed it. I was set to install 6.06, but then I saw that 6.10 was available and went with that. It's amazing what you take for granted on this distro. Samba has been a bitch to get running (I still haven't quite gotten Windows to talk to my samba share). sudo apt-get install samba doesn't install all of Samba, just little bits and pieces of it. SSH isn't installed, and every single freaking port on the firewall is blocked off, requiring you to poke a hole whenever you need one. But, if it comes down to it, I can just blow the partition and start fresh with a different version. There's nothing I need on it, so long as Edgy doesn't turn the hard drive into a paperweight.
...except the partition with the home-directories which are including the personal config-files, themes, settings and other custom things.
/etc/-directory.
This leads to a new, clean system. All you have to to ist to restore the system's configurations related to hardware-settings, services etc. And in most cases you also can backup these files from the
I do it that way since many years, never had any problems or instabilities. And the time-consuming is moderate.
Well, my experience was this:
I upgraded my old box to edgy eft (unstable) a couple of weeks ago, before "stable" release... upgrade was fine.
I upgraded my newer (needs-to-be-stable) box to edgy eft "stable", and big problems.
I just updated from edgy eft-unstable (from two weeks ago) to edgy eft-stable (release), and no problems there.
What have canonical gone and done, to screw up only the release?
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
Yesterday I attempted to upgrade my laptop from Dapper to Edgy.
Lets just say its good its a dual boot, and I'm posting from Windows.
The upgrade program kept fighting with the system, and I'm left unable to use X-windows realiably (it crashes randomly), wireless no longer works (so I can't update any packages or search the web for hints as to what went wrong).
Its going to take me hours to fix everything, I'm guessing. Its probably going to be faster to wipe it out and reinstall from scratch. They definitely blew it on the upgrade, though. (And this wasn't a hacked to hell Dapper install, it was pretty much out of the box)
I must have been lucky - the 'official method' worked fine for me, and I have a wireless internet card, LVM, and nvidia graphics (a typical deal breaker).
Nothing had to be changed or edited, "It just work[s|ed]"(TM)
As a way to get some scripts to execute faster they changed from using bash as the default shell, to dash. dash breaks compatibility all over the place, none of the extensions found in practically every other bourne shell derivative are there. I first found out about this when someone using one of my scripts reported that 'read -s' (for reading passwords without echoing them) and 'trap function SIGINT' both give errors.
/usr/bin/bash elsewhere, /usr/local/bin/bash in other places, bash doesn't come on OS X and BSD but /bin/sh works, etc).
So if the scripts you write are going to be used on Eft, you have to either drop a lot of functionality, or tell users to replace #!/bin/sh with #!/bin/bash (which, of course, only works on Eft; it's
A bit of a reckless move for a bit of extra speed. It would have been more respectable if the Ubuntu team had worked on optimizing bash instead of going for a crippled, but faster, shell.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I use SUSE, and I upgraded from 9.3 to 10.0 with very few issues (although I admit there were a few - but little required even going to a console to fix), and then from 10.0 to 10.1 with no issues, and then I upgraded *again* from 10.1 to SLED with absolutely no problems whatsoever - and I have a customized installation with runlevels edited, custom modules compiled and installed, NVIDIA drivers, SMART Package Manager, etc. etc.
Yet it's upgraded very smoothly for me every time - it even lets me boot the old kernel in case something goes wrong with drivers or whatnot by adding an entry to GRUB.
If Novell can do it, so can the Ubuntu team.
Unbelievable! They have actually taken step backward! I have blank screen after I reboot the computer with Edgy Eft installer CD. The previous installer version (Dapper Drake) worked nicely on same hardware. I have Matrox Millenium P750 graphics adapter.
How can the quality control be this bad? Even if you consider that this bug was reported before the official release was out. They did nothing to fix the problem!
Maybe now I should consider upgrading my workstation at work to Dapper. After all, I upgraded to Breezy once Dapper was released. Staying a release behind isn't so bad, when releases come out fairly often like with Ubuntu. It's still more up to date than the _latest_ release of something with a long release cycle, but you avoid the worst early adopter problems.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I upgraded my laptop from Dapper to Edgy using the upgrade path. It went really well.
Not only did the upgrade work okay, but Edgy performs much better than Dapper, and now I have suspend and hibernate working out of the box, wireless working etc.
With the wide variation in hardware out there it's not surprising that people are having problems, but at the end of the day the Ubuntu upgrade path is far far better than anything else I have tried. Windows upgrade anyone?
...this is what they meant by 'Edgy'. We thought it was going to be brand-new features, fresh new artwork and a load of beta and CVS versions of programs. But no, none of that. Instead, we have an updater that has a 50/50 chance of destroying everything on your computer. Now *that's* edgy!
The guy who provided details had his installation fail because he had modified his system in non-standard ways. If he's doing that, he should also be capable of upgrading himself, otherwise, he should have stayed with what he had working, or consulted someone before upgrading, or even paid an expert to help him upgrade.
... that this was not supposed to be production-ready release.
:-)
It had a very short development cycle (only 4 months, because of dapper's delay).
It was supposed to be 'edgy' and an unstable entry point for future next-gen Ubuntu releases.
It's not even available in Shipit!
Dapper is recommended for a casual user, Edgy is for a little more advanced users, who know what to do when something breaks.
So while your opinions are very welcome, don't blame Ubuntu guys for screwing up the distro. It's just the way it was planned to be
Cheers!
In my opinion, both disribs have issues, but I still prefer gentoo despite de fact that it is somewhat more compicated to manage than Ubuntu. So why is that ?
...
Because with Gentoo, I write the config files myself, and in fact i HAVE to, in most cases.
The consequence is that I know how everything works and most issues are resolved quickly ( well it fells quick anyway ).
I also use Ubuntu on my laptop, and when something breaks, it's much harder to get to the source of the problem.
This may seem like a mad idea, but I would certainly like ubuntu to be less dependent on graphical administration tools. The problem may be that Ubuntu hides to much from the user, even if he is an administrator.
stop me if this is nonsense
I had problems upgrading hoary to breezy, and breezy to dapper. Each time my X server broke and lots of video drivers broke. This time the upgrade was almost perfect!
I had one very slight problem, and that was my GTK2 theme. I had that fixed within 5 minute. Now I'm on edgy and absolutely loving it.
I'm running Edgy on a laptop that's notoriously troublesome with Linux: the Inspiron 6000 - Ubuntu's been the only distro that I've had no problems with at all, and the update was no exception. I think my only complaint with it is the rancid colour choice on the default theme, and that bloody awful jingle on startup and shutdown, but these are all readily solvable.
If anything, I found the 'gksudo "update-manager -c -d" method worked fine for me: the only problem was the amount of time that it took, because it defaulted to about 150KB/s on my connection (oh noes!); of course, remembering the days of 14.4Kbaud modems made that slightly easier...
As to the laptop itself: my only issue is the fact that it was made very visibly obsolete within a year; no surprises there. That, plus the fact that Beryl's not particularly fast on it: no worries as far as I'm concerned: I don't use it, but I thought it was worthy of note...
http://xkcd.com/313/
Switching profiles is nothing like dist-upgrading. All it requires is changing a symlink, and then running 'emerge world' to see if anything changes have been made, which generally haven't.
Don't confuse the modular X 'headache' into this discussion either, if you read the guide, it was a piece of cake.
I upgraded to latest Ubuntu 2 days ago on my laptop and everything went OK after the 800Mb download. I've got a new very fast Linux box on my laptop. No idea how works the fresh install, but the upgrade is nice for me (if you have a high speed download rate, of course) Have an happy upgrade, Cheers
asphyx/Logofactory^Coolphat^Superior Art Creations^ACiD Productions^Remorse^The Loop http://asphyx0r.deviantart.com
Huh, with all these troubles of FF and Ubuntu (and whatnot), I'm really curious how my anticipated apt-get upgrade of Sarge will do (in December, so I hope !) ?
... .
Please, Debian-guys, don't leave me standing in a similar cold then !
One goodie, though: It seems we on the *nix side of the world will be done by end of this year (yes, OpenBSD 4.0 will be out in 3 days), and I'll hopefully have an updated Festive Season and a clean New Year - while our friends on W32 will probably have to enjoy a disruptive 2007
My suggestion to these guys and girls: switch-Switch-SWITCH-SWITCH !! No matter if OSX, Linux, BSD; but SWITCH ! - And enjoy a quiet 2007 !
Well, duh, of course it's problematic if you use a server with RAID and remotely upgrade from a long term support to an edgy distribution (6.06 was supposed to be rock stable, and edgy to be a little unstable and, um... edgy, remember?)
On the other hand, it's easy for me to say that - I did a clean install...
All in all, edgy disappointed me - nothing REALLY new, and now this article about updgrades going wild...
Or, use another never-ending distro such as the usually not so unstable debian unstable and testing. Quite bleeding edge, and a personal desktop with either of these simply won't take as much time to keep running as gentoo.
Maybe read the rest of the sentence you quoted: "but previous Ubuntu releases....have done surprisingly well". RTFA is one thing, but Read The Fucking Sentence? Come on.
Also, disagreeing with an article doesn't make it FUD. Perhaps you should tell all the people on the linked to Ubuntu forum that all their upgrades went flawlessly?
Oh yeah? Tried to "upgrade" from x86 to amd64?
The modular X headache wasn't too bad on x86 and only took a couple of hours. It is practically unsupported on ~amd64...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Oh well. I guess that's what I get for wanting the latest and greatest...
Not nonsense really. It makes sense to me, which is why I still use Gentoo. There is something reassuring abount a set of command-line tools and forums. Too often a system is borked up too badly to get into the graphical tool. Hmm, actually that might just be my system...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I used the apt-get method to upgrade from 6.06 following instructions available here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdgyUpgrades exactly - no problem. And *everything* still works. Dell Latitude D400 40GB 512MB.
Paul Beardsell
is always the kernel + initrd. i have used custom kernels forever and never had any problems with upgrades (been using debian, kubuntu, rh, rhel, suse, sles, gentoo...you name it)
:/. i am upgrading as i speak and can't wait to see if everything works fine but i do not expect major problems. if there will be any i will let you guys know ^^.
the problem is you just can't expect an average user to know how to deal with kernel/module/initrd problems
First please don't write confusing articles by using negatives like that. eg: Updates are bad, but not in linux., but not in edgy.
The update worked for me. Fine. And my mum pulled the plug on my computer half way through. I had a similar situation updating Fedora from CD, when half the discs were corrupt. Updating linux is piss easy - thank you package managers - they're only older than me. Fedora: yum for rpm. Debian: apt for dpkg. If you've succeeded in installing something, an update is no harder. man apt-get
This is ubuntuforums, remember. When some ppl say "trouble" there they mean having to edit a text file or run some shit in bash. There's no such thing as trouble in linux, so long as you can get a shell. And unless you're stupid enough to leave only one buggy kernel you built yourself using make randomconfig, you won't get a kernel panic.
It's crazed. You have ppl writing shell scripts to build firefox two for those who've wet themselves about it and can't wait for a package to appear in the repos, who can't tell you what the G in GNU stands for.
I had the same issue as quite a few people have mentioned - I ran gksu 'update-manager -c' - the installer tried to remove /usr/X11R6/bin to make it a symlink, couldn't, borked and died.
I removed the files in /usr/X11R6/bin (tora) and then recontinued the upgrade with apt-get -f install as the borked upgrade suggested. Worked like a charm, everything came up fine after the install, including my nvidia card (yeah, with the binary driver)
Edgy is faster than dapper, and so far its stable.
Maybe I was just lucky :)
... I rebooted my VM and it all went to shit. I've been running Dapper on VM for a good while and it was running smoothly. I assumed the upgrade would give me more responsiveness and an overall jump in performance. It couldn't be further from the truth. Once the new kernel was booted VMWare went to "oh shit!" mode and gave me a quarter of the screen I've normally worked in. Even the bootCD can give me 1024x768 but 640x480 is unworkable in KDE. Installing Tools ends in failure because of the new X.org 7.1 which it doesn't want to compile with. Good thing this was a VM, I can always rollback to the last good nsapshot.
At least with Linux you don't have to reboot to patch it... just completely reinstall the whole OS! (preps to be moded down)
Edgy Eft is full of new and beta packages, and it has had half the release cycle of most ubuntu versions. Because of this, I'm amazed that it's working as well as it is. If people want stability,
stick with Dapper! You'll save yourself headaches. There's a reason why they have LTS on Dapper.
all i can say is i had ubuntu 6.06 + compiz + xgl and it all worked perfectly. if it wasnt for the fact wine wouldnt play wow id deinstall windows.
... here is the kicker .. World of Warcraft now works AND a few other games that didnt before. im spending this morning removing MS Windows :p
i then did the update from System - Admin - update manager and hey presto (3hrs later of downloads) no buttons to press and only had to choose to keep my config files intact. And it is all working. boots faster than ever. XGL and compiz effects all in tact AND
Best upgrade ever imho and im not an advanced ubuntu user but a damned happy one.
My laptop's audio stopped working after I upgraded from Dapper to Edgy. Downloading and compiling the latest alsa drivers didn't seem to fix it either.
One other problem I've had with Ubuntu, even before I upgraded to Edgy, is with wireless. My Intel 3945 wifi card was a pain to get working in Dapper. Connecting to my access point, with wpa supplicant, sometimes takes 20 minutes, other times it takes only a few seconds. Edgy doesn't seem to have fixed it. I'm not sure if the problem is with my access point (Netgear WAG302), or Ubuntu's wifi support.
I'm kind of a newbie to the Ubuntu thing, so i may be wrong, but i thought Edgy was an unstable and experimental release, and Dapper is still recommended for normal users?
They got Dapper out the door, stable, and then went to work mixing it up putting tonnes of new fancy stuff in. It's not been that long since dapper, so of course Edgy is unstable. I'm guessing the plan is to push forward the tech, and then solidify it and make it stable in future releases, until they have one they feel comfortable supporting as well as Dapper.
Both my Ubuntu machines are still on Dapper, and i have no plans nor reason to upgrade until they make another stable release.
This is a story, sure, but i think it's being cast in the wrong light. No one should have expected an upgrade, or even a fresh install, to have been as bug-free as Dapper.
Once you open your sources.list up to include universe and multiverse, all upgrade bets are off. How can you possibly expect the ubuntu team to consider every unknown eventuality.
I haven't had these types of upgrade problems with Debian, but that could be because they release so seldom.
In my experience with debian, upgrading between releases were mostly flawless.
/etc/apt/sources.list 2. apt-get update 3. apt-get dist-upgrade
I've did it from potato to woody, from woody to sarge, from sarge to etch, from woody to sid and a lot of other combinations...
It took three steps: 1. changing the repositories in
Then of course, sid is the "perpetual fresh" or "cutting edge" release, so you don't tend to upgrade from there. I'm sure there are lots of breakages in sid, but what I had noticed in roughly 4 years of sid usage was that an X library broke mplayer for two week until an updated package was pushed, that's all.
My point in rambling about debian in an ubuntu article is that ubuntu is debian based, so it is a step backwards to lose relatively painless upgradeability.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I have an old Dell c640 laptop and everything works fine after the latest upgrade, from dapper to edgy. The same happened when I upgraded from breezy to dapper. I don't know, but maybe I was lucky. What people should understand is that upgrading the whole operating system is not an easy case. The fact that something probably will go wrong must be expected. It is like resizing your partitions, but you have not kept any backups. If you have a production quality system an upgrade is realized only when it is necessary. I know that when an operating system supports a functionality like the upgrade-manager it should work as it supposed to work, but when an upgrade is performed on the very first day, definitely, there will be unresolved issues because the product has not been tested exhaustively. That is, thousands of people downloaded the RC version but probably, hundreds of thousands have tried the latest version when it was released. Everyone is complaining that EDGY is not a major upgrade and it has nothing to show but here is what I found: - Now my IPOD works fine with Rhythmbox (songs can be deleted from and uploaded to the device) - Some bugs (that were affecting my every day work) in Evolution have been resolved - QT libraries have been updated. Try now to use keepassx (the open source password manager). Its interface is great. - I had some rendering issues with Google Earth. Every time I had to maximize and minimize it in order to work properly. Now everything is fine. - I have noticed that a lot of applications have been upgraded to their latest versions: Gaim, VLC player(0.86). - XEN is supposed to work more easily in edgy. I have not tried it yet, but it has been in included in apt-get and there is an article in the wiki. - Boot up time has been reduced. ... and probably other people will find out that there more and more optimizations.
apt-get --fix-missing update works for me. It takes a few tries as postgresql and a few others fail (grub for some reason?) but it ends up working out. Slashdot didn't used to exaggerate the stories as much. Maybe it's just me.. but it wasn't a "nightmare" to upgrade.
because I've upgraded 2 machines from dapper to edgy and it's been the smoothest upgrade I've *ever* done.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
I did have some trouble upgrading from Dapper (to which I upgraded from 5.10), the first time I ran the upgrade it choked out because a package hadn't been removed when it should (bad dependencies probably), at least it kept the 1.4GB of packages it downloaded first. A few overwritten config files later I ran apt-get update & apt-get upgrade a few times then bit the bullet and restarted, surprisingly the system booted (albeit without the new usplash due to an fsck being run on /). I was greeted by the login prompt, the theme had been changed back and my alarm clock user no longer automatically logged in after 100 seconds - due to the new gdm.conf the upgrade made.
Having logged in I noticed my theme and icons had been changed which was a little intrusive, but everything seemed to run fine.
Speedwise not much has changed (although Firefox 2 seems to be quite proficient at consuming memory when more than a few tabs are open), the quicker boot times advertised don't really show although my system does seem to shut down considerably faster now.
I'm surprised I haven't been thrown back to textmode like I was when trying to go from 5.10, but I agree the process could be made better.
... since upgrading by much the same means as you describe, Firefox won't play Flash content anymore. Works fine in Konqueror. Something to do with going to FF 2.0, I suppose. I'll puzzle it out soon enough, but it's hardly a show-stopper.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think anyone who actually installed it at all without having to make some compromises to their intended settings is pretty lucky. For example, the partitioner gparted simply refused to recognise the ext3 partition that I planned to freshly install to. So I had to forgo indexing when I had to install to an ext2 partition. Yes, WTF indeed. Then fstab forced me to mount other partitions through the terminal, as I didn't want then to automount my porno... um, windows partitions, something that was as easy as double clicking the partitions icon in 6.06.
The fonts in emacs look a little strange (after dapper -> edgy upgrade), searched the forums and ound some people whos fonts were totally borked, but not quite my problem. Figured I'd wait a few days and see if someone fixes it.
Really though, if people want rock solid, either stick with dapper, or at least wait until the release has been out a few weeks/months before upgrading.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Maybe I just have more tricky hardware, and I tend to install clean (I keep /home on a separate partition and mount if on rebuild as /oldhome so I can pick what I move over) - and always bought the boxed DVDs (the idea was to sponsor the development - "give back for what you take" principle).
I found 10.1 a pain in the proverbial to get going. Also, compared to Ubuntu that darn thing is HUGE. So, eventually I cut over to Ubuntu and my test server wil probably be next. Takes while to find everything but I'm quite happy with Ubuntu. As for the payback, I have a couple of crackers coming. You will know when I get busy, believe me.
= Ch =
Insert
I did an upgrade to Edgy from Dapper and it seemed to go almost flawlessly, except for a slow dl rate that required a few attempts at getting all the packages. When I tried upgrading the video driver (nvidia 7950) so I could use Compiz and Beryl and that was a mess. I still don't have surround and for some reason Eclipse doesn't work. I haven't had time to figure out why and I don't need it at the moment but I'm still wondering why it's broken.
The unexamined life is not worth living
This could be the singular most harmful thing to open source that has happened all year. As many of you know, Ubuntu has been a solid distribution for new Linux users who are trying to ween themselves off of Windows. These people stopped using Windows for a variety of reasons: It crashed a lot, nothing seemed to work reliably, uninstalling software was dodgy, etc. To have a minor Ubuntu upgrade manifest the same problems they thought they were leaving behind is to suggest to them "Why don't you just run Windows anyway?"
Somehow they knew people would be "edgy" over this "eft" up release.
Your text config files are still there (in /etc for example) with Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't 'force' you to use the gui.
Seconded.
I switched from Dapper to Debian testing about a month ago. I used quite a few programs from universe which tend to get out of date pretty quickly, hence the switch. I plan to just stay with testing rather than keep with Etch as it moves into stable. Testing is a nice balance between the staleness of stable and the "danger" of unstable. It may be the distro of choice for someone who can fix some bad packages here and there, but that person isn't me.
Now I've upgrated to 6.10 and I'm having a hell of problems:
Ubuntu is a nice distro, but my feeling is that this time they rushed too much the release. They should had take more time to polish it, and include some bleeding edge things on it that where left out because of the schedule.
I'm doing the first upgrade of three right now... so far only a few little minor issue's that were sorted pretty quick.
The biggest issue was the DNS breakage of contribs.org.
I have faith.. it seems ok so far.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
That is exactly the boat that I'm sitting in, and yet the Gentoo developers are keen to perpetuate the myth that there is no equivalent to a dist upgrade in Gentoo. The last straw was when after doing an:
my profile completely disappeared an portage was left broken. Forced upgrades don't exactly jive with the 'ultimate in customization' philosophy; a warning and an option would have been nice... The quality of the ebuilds haven't exactly been improving lately either (and yes I file bug reports ad nauseum).
As noted here:
9 9
/tomas
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2865
The following command works fine:
gksu "update-manager -c"
I've tried it. Works perfectly fine! Whats the problem?
your /home is SUPPOSED to be a different partition. I can fresh install all day long and never ever touch my user files and important data. That is how I did the last 4 Ubuntu upgrades. erase ubuntu, install new, login and magically all my stuff is still there, even my desktop layout, background image and mozilla bookmarks.
Are people doing silly things and installing to a single partition again??
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yeah this bit me this week too. The nvidia-glx package has completely disappeared from the new tree, so after doing an emerge --sync I was screwed. No way to upgrade the driver without doing the whole X thing. No way to rollback to my working tree. It really does bite.
Luckily this box is an amd64 running the x86 profile and so the X upgrade was relatively straightforward. But what ever happened to the idea that Gentoo offered choice?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Once again I renew my call for the editors to get with the program and use an Ubuntu icon rather than a Debian icon when posting stories about Ubuntu. Yes, Ubuntu is derived from Debian, but it is arguably the most popular GNU/Linux distro on the desktop. I would think this warrants its own icon.
Hi, I make Kubuntu. I'm well aware that dist-upgrade has a lot of problems with upgrading to edgy. That's why porting the upgrade tool from Ubuntu will be a priority for Feisty. In the mean time you can use the Ubuntu upgrade tool on Kubuntu fine or you can dist-upgrade and then explicity tell it to install/upgrade the packages it keeps back.
First Firefox 2.0, then SP3 for XP delayed to 2008? And Vista is soon out! Where will it all end?! I'll tell you! Where it all started! In Munich where the hairy legged secretaries are hacking the kernel as foreplay for an office romance! Viva La Beaver(ia)!
More people likely would report bugs if the response they got when they did report bugs was more civilized.
Let me tell you about one incident I witnessed on IRC, in #firefox. In short, the bug reporter had found a bug, and mentioned it while chatting. If I recall correctly, it would cause a crash on PPC Linux. I tried reproducing it on my G4 Mac Mini running Debian, and it was indeed a bug, so I confirmed it.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Some other chatter outright told us this was not a bug. We asked him why not, and he said "Because I couldn't reproduce it on Windows." You can imagine how surprised we were at this show of stupidity. We explained to him that it was a problem witnessed on Linux running on PowerPC systems. I'm not sure if it was the same person or a posse of Firefox fanatics, but at that point about 15 other people chimed in to say that it wasn't a bug, saying they couldn't reproduce the bug on their Windows or i386 Linux systems.
Knowing how trollish Firefox fanatics can be, I just ignored their responses. I urged the original reporter to submit a Bugzilla report. His basic response was, "I've never been so insulted by these goddamn Mozilla fools. I will not be submitting a bug report, and I will not be using any of their products ever again."
Looking back, I can't blame him. Getting that kind of a response when trying to alert the community to a real bug is absurd. I think he was right, so I've also stopped using Mozilla software, instead using Opera as my web browser and mutt as my email client. I don't want to be associated with a community that has so many jackasses.
I've seen similar incidents happen in various other IRC channels and mailing lists. Somebody reports a bug, and then a mass of other users deny that it's an actual bug. Nevertheless, I experience the very same crash or corrupted files when I try to reproduce it. The open source community does depend on these bug reports. Thus, efforts should not be undertaken to scare away those who do report very serious problems.
The major problem I hit seems to be related to software RAID where the boot is hanging for 6 minutes with a black
screen with no diags. (filed as bug 68888).
This seems to be related to the change to UUID's (which IMHO is horrid even more so than RHELs use of LABELs - I can
remember that my root device was hda1 or has a label of / but anyone who can remember a UUID
of 9d3f7a30-72ef-4d24-947c-3efc6bd9e6b6 should get a job as a memory man or IPV6 coordinator).
However, with that sorted I haven't hit anything else; there were the normal couple of dependency problems
during the dist-upgrade relating to other stuff I'd installed.
I'm sorry, some of it isn't nonsense so much as you haven't made it clear exactly what you're doing with all the config file editing. I've been using Gentoo exclusively for years now, and I've found that just like most other flavors of Linux, once you've got everything the way you want it, that's it--no further maintenance or config file editing is required. It doesn't break or mysteriously stop working, which means I'm spending a lot more time using my computer instead of diagnosing software problems. That's why when you talk about "issues" in a general sense, I'm not really clear on what those might be.
;) It wouldn't hurt to share your issues over on the Gentoo forums. Those people are extremely helpful and are bound to get you through any Gentoo quirks you may have run into. Cheers!
It helps, of course, that I very seldom upgrade my hardware. If you're one of those people who buys a new Wacom tablet, scanner, printer, joystick, or whatever else every few weeks, then it would be unrealistic to think that hotplug or coldplug is going to keep you from doing the finessing that Gentoo often requires to get that stuff running. If not, and problems seem to crop up on a daily basis, then you could very well be doing something wrong
You're kidding, right? I've been maintaining several Debian Sid systems for years, with only occasional minor upgrading problems. So you're saying Ubuntu breaks this core functionality of Debian all to hell. Nice work! Do please keep it up!
Look people, you got great software for free.. so you have upgrade problems, big deal.
Just be glad you didnt pay 300 bucks for the 'upgrade' that eats your system. Just reinstall like it was suggested and be happy.
Geesh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't get it. So you are saying that we need peanuts to purchase Vista?
Disclaimer: Ubuntu (and Debian) is my favourite disto.
.DEB-package based. If we had something like .RPM - the dependency problems would be something to worry about :) [no FUD intended]
I had the opportunity of upgrading 8 (!) boxes with Ubuntu in a numerous ways. So I feel obligated to say something.
Two of them came from 6.06 to 6.10 Knot 3 and then were upgraded every single day to the final release.
Three PCs came to 6.10 using "update-manager -c -d" - that went flawlessly.
Two servers (console-only) with 6.06 had to be treated with apt-get dist-upgrade. That went good too.
My personal box - a HP nx6110 laptop had a few problems, but this was my fault. Read below:
Most of the people (if not all) having problems with using "update-manager -c" don't admit messing it up by using non-official repositories. That python problem with update-manager -> 'cause You had that libmesa-dri package installed from that compiz repository.
How come an official upgrade deal with a package two versions higher than it should be?
Linux is freedom - You are free to install other unofficial packages with crazy dependencies and cvs libraries that will be officially released 2months later. But don't expect that someone will have the time to consider Your "nerdiness". Fixing uncommon problems is what the community is for.
Happy that Ubuntu is
Greetz.
"/bin/sh" is different all over the place, it's just supposed to be POSIX, you shouldn't assume it's bash.
A better alternative is to use "/usr/bin/env bash". This will work even if the path to bash is not what you expect it to be.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Okay, brand new craptop (Dell Latitude 120L with a 1GB memory upgrade). WinXP Pro. A gig of RAM. All the hardware on it is supported by both Drake and Eft.
/etc/fstab mod here I come. Except that, even after a reboot, and double and triple checking that the entry in /etc/fstab are correct, Eft simply WOULD NOT mount my NTFS partition.
The LiveCD looks just fine. Nearly identical to the Drake LiveCD.
The installer worked beautifully, as always. And you can now resize your NTFS partitions quite easily with the partitioner.
Rebooted into the full install and started poking around.
Got all my regular software in. Automatix took care of the rest of the necessities.
On the whole, Eft seemed a bit more responsive than Dapper has on other machines of similar power.
However, I noticed that the Disk manager was missing from the admin menu. So I couldn't just dig into my NTFS partition. Bummer. Oh well,
As I need to occasionally leech files from my Windows install, this kinda pissing in my cornflakes. And everything, and I mean EVERYTHING else works beautifully!
Tried to reinstall. Identical problem happened.
So, ripped it out again and went back to Dapper.
Okay, to be absoloutely FAIR about this, we WERE told that Edgy was just that. So it's not surprising that there are issues happening here. But people have been so ingrained with the "Gotta have the latest and greatest" idiocy that problems like this are inevitable.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This was a reply to a post that was deleted while I was replying. Original post was: "Re:U GET WAT U PAY 4 !".
My network ports got flipped around (eth1 and eth0 got mapped onto different hardware).
IMO, you shouldn't have to submit a bug to be able to complain. Writing a good bug report is a fair amount of work, and if you're expected to do it whenever the OS whenever the OS has issues, then that OS is suddenly a lot of extra work to use.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I'd never consider upgrading a distro like this. Save off your settings and personal files, wipe and reinstall. As many have found, the alternative is asking for trouble.
Even so, let's hope some good comes of this. Perhaps it will encourage the Ubuntu team to take a hard look at what they're doing and where they're at. In retrospect, calling anything like this "Edgy" was a mistake. Ubuntu is aimed at newer and less technically-minded users on the desktop, primarily. That puts a premium on easy, simple and reliable, not on "edgy" as in "the latest gizmos for techies". Techies are not Ubuntu's natural territory. If you want the bleeding edge and all that goes with it, there are 1001 other distros to use. Maybe Ubuntu will decide that its core appeal does not lie in this game, and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, imho, it risks losing the tremendous goodwill it has built up. Ubuntu has never been "just another distro", but if it allows itself to be led only by what developers want, it could easily become one.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Vast majority of people having something to say in Ubuntu Forums on the topic of upgrading to Edgy will be those who have had trouble. Therefore claiming that upgrading to Edgy is difficult, troublesome, prone to failure etc. makes sense only when compared to how other Ubuntu editions fared in the same process -- not when taken alone. I do not defend Edgy update process per se (I did a clean reinstall off a DVD, anyhow) nor do I defend Ubuntu, but still, this is a pretty basic statistical issue; the population sampled is a _very_ biased one.
Another point is that Ubuntu might have gained a lot of new users since Dapper came out. In that case, a sheer increase in the number of people/issues encountered during an upgrade might in part be a product of a larger user base, not only of the inherent instability of the process.
Ah! This would explain your presence very neatly, then...
Somebody hide the peanuts, please.
yeah indeed. I'm on Ubuntu (upgraded to Edgy the other day, without any major issues, just had to use "the force" with dpkg a few times) on my main machine, because I'm a lazy bastard and want a shiny default desktop. The ubuntu packages for most desktop-environment related things (which i mostly use) are quite up to date, but as parent said, some other stuff tends to get quite old in ubuntu.
How strange it may seem at the first glance, I prefer to run Debian's never ending beta, testing on my home server. Maybe not a good idea for a production environment, (not really any security fixes, but new packages from unstable now and then), but since it's a never ending distro with updates every day i can keep up to date without ever having to worry about doing massive dist-upgrades or even boot because of an upgrade. A lot of small neat unix tools are much more up to date in debian testing than in Ubuntu, and testing doesn't seem to be likely to eat kittens in small scale home server use, although some desktop oriented packages seem to be temporarily missing now and then.
I upgraded a couple of boxes and it went like a charm.
I suppose this is why, in the past, I did fresh installs rather than upgrades. My upgrade of Dapper to Edgy (Kubuntu) was a nightmare, and is still not straightened out in full.
The first thing I did was to download the Alternate CD image, since I figured it would be better to not have to download it later in the day when I got home and my parents would need the bandwidth for their business stuff (Edgy was released on my 18th birthday).
Now, I had to use the apt-get method of updating, which produced more problems than I've ever had with apt. I had it fail out on me three times. First time was overnight, as it decided it wanted to download most of its stuff over the internet instead of using my CD. It failed to download one little 117kb package and thus completely stopped the upgrade. I continued it when I woke up. The anjunta package just killed the upgrade for some reason, and nothing would make it go, so I ended up getting into Adept and removing it. I then installed the packages that had downloaded and continued the update. It failed out again along the way, and I forget how I straightened that out or what was wrong.
So it was starting to get finicky due to the mismatched parts and whatnot, so once the update finished, at long last, I restarted the thing. To which I found a problem.
X server would not start.
It was the craziest thing! I had a problem similar to this with Dapper that turned out to have something to do with not liking the graphical splash screen that hid the bootup, so I tried booting without it. It dropped me at a command line, and I did what any person who knows even a little about Linux would do: I ran 'startx'.
Error: Xinit not found.
(Not word for word, but I remember something about X failing)
What the hell? So, I figure, it's cool, it's an update, these things happen, though from the noise I'd heard about (K)Ubuntu, I wasn't expecting it. (I'm a former Fedora user) So I decide to hop onto Lynx to see if I can find any information. I keep getting 404 errors all over the place. Nothing will move. After about 15 minutes of this, I realized that, although my eth1 interface was up, it hadn't been configured properly!
sudo ifdown eth1
sudo ifup eth1
All resolved. I then went to my other computer to try and find a resolution to this problem. I searched some forums and found someone with a similar problem. The thread recommended installing some package that, when I went to apt-get it, I realized what the problem was.
Xorg-server had not installed.
Why did the upgrade even go through if it hadn't installed Xorg!? This made no sense. No sooner did I let Xorg install, then 'startx' worked and I was right into KDE. Which, I might add, had lost most of my preferences, such as appearance of windows and mouse behavior (I prefer double-click to single-click), and it seems to like hanging for a few seconds when I try to go to my auto-hiding menu on the right side of my screen.
Upon restarting it again, my network again failed to be configured for some reason, which is one of the exact problems I switched away from Fedora to get away from. KDE also made all my fonts a ton smaller and screwed with my desktop appearance again, which I have yet to bother trying to troubleshoot, as I think it's a more efficient use of my screen. The fonts also look much different (read--better) now, but for some reason, the numbers on KWifiManager's tray icon are extremely small and the top 1/3 or so is cut off.
I wish I could say I was pleased with Kubuntu Edgy, but all in all, my reaction is more of a "meh." I do like some things, like how XMMS doesn't scroll a whole page at a time when I scroll with my mouse wheel. I also like the newer kernel, which I'd been missing since I left Fedora, since 2.6.17 is the first kernel to have support for my FusionHDTV5-USB. I'm find it to be far easier to use on Kubuntu than it was in Fedora, mainly because Xine will actually install on Kubuntu, and not just complain abo
cant even get the iso install CD to fully boot (!)
it gets to the point where it starts to load the linux kernal, and then...
[55.018231] unable to locate RSDP (invalid compressed format (err=2)
[55.028758] Kernal panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount roof fs on unknown-block(1,)
and it insists on making the 1024x768 LCD screen a 800x600 screen by default
unless i manually hack the xorg.conf file (ugh) -- a normal user would NEVER
know how to do that. oh, and thinkpad 770 sound never worked...
guess its back to dapper for me....
I am sorry to say that as much as some people have a few issues, I have not personally seen anything that was too bad. I almost think this posting is something FUD like somewhat. Even with limited Linux knowledge I was quite able to upgrade to Edgy from Dapper ( did it with RC ver ). I upgraded 4 machines to edgy ( 2 clean , 2 internal ) excluding my primary desktop. Now when you are dealing with your production.. business... money making computers upgrading to new versions immediately is ridiculous and stupid with any system.... so of course my major computers are still running Dapper... they are of far too much value to be toyed with... but after the release kinks are worked out... then those machines will be carefully upgraded. In either case I reiterate that there are no systemic problems with edgy eft, and to state that there are is to spread FUD. -Brendt
- Firefox crashed on Flash, Edgy clobbered xorg.conf
- No more SMP support for my Core Duo. No, the generic kernel doesn't see the second core, I've tried all the online work-arounds
- Sound support is flaky, after a reboot it's about 50% chance there is any sound at all
- It is now completely random which media application can play a media file.
I'm going back to Dapper, I'll be back for 7.04 or 7.10 (Grotty Gofer)
!ERR: Signature not found.
First The story about firefox now the one about ubuntu? I'm using both currently and I'll tell you that I am having problems with the new firefox, bad memory leakage, and with the ubuntu upgrade, VTing won't work. You have to wonder how this will affect the OSS community if some of the greatest software they have is being rushed and not hair-splittingly looked over for bugs.
N. A. Stuart
When I upgraded to Dapper on my development laptop (a primary machine of mine, since I travel to code frequently), it turned off halfway through the install. I thought to myself, dang, that was unlucky, and then proceeded to spend an entire day fixing the upgrade. I got it working, and perfectly, but it took a whole saturday.
Same. Thing. In. Eft. No way could it be my laptop's fault - plugged in and all. Anyway, it completed the upgrade but now when it boots it tells me that it doesn't have the sources installed for the current kernel (which is standard for the basic ubuntu install - I'm used to installing them afterwards). Anyway, it wants the sources to compile some module, and so my machine will not boot.
At any rate, right now I've got a 5.10 LiveCD in there, apt-got ssh, and I'm scping across my home directory to a mac mini I've got for posterity. Then I'm wiping the drive and separating my home dir into a different partition like I should have all along. Then the next upgrade will most certainly be a fresh install. Sigh. Restore my confidence, oh ubuntu masters.
-knewter
i tried using the update manager via 6.06, and all was fine and dandy (230kb/s download speeds!) until it decided to crash midway through installing.
i couldn't run the update manager again, and being a linux noob (about one month of use to this day!) i had no idea what to do, and nothing worked. so i restarted (bad bad bad idea) and it threw me into a buggered login, a handful of errors and then it hanged, and never worked since.
i downloaded the ISO of 6.10, and installing that was as much of a nightmare as it was for 6.06 (due to my mobo having integrated intel graphics it would boot the live CD with the wrong Xorg file, and the usual DMA errors from my cd drive) and in the end, i couldn't use the old tricks to get what were HDA1 and HDB1 (both NTFS partitions) to appear. so i'm reverting back to 6.06 and picking up on a few weeks worth of fiddling about.
It seems it isn't just me. This has been the "apt-get dist-upgrade" from hell. I cannot remember I ever had such a bad update in my whole Linux life. Literally _nothing_ worked. It didnt even boot. ACPI problems. Lots of package problems. X-Server broken. My only help was that I'm a pretty advanced user and had a second PC at work so I could use a rescue disk, research problems and start repairing. dpkg-divert, fglrx, noacpi, fontconfig, and so on. I now know them all like the back of my hand. Ugh. Works now. A novice Linux user could only have wiped his disk I suppose. New features? None worth mentioning for me. All new things (Suspend mode, Upstart) just dont work as advertised. Edgy? A bit over the edge actually.
I aptituded from Dapper to Edgy. First the system would not find the root partition, because it had old UUID in /boot/grub/menu.lst. I replaced it with my root partition device file name (/dev/sda1) and it booted. I recompiled Wine and MPlayer. Now Wine segfaults when launched and MPlayer can't play audio using the default API (=mp3lib, others work fine).
Who is John Galt?
I actually jumped two versions breezy to dapper then edgy all in one shot. I lost the desktop
when upgrading from breezy to dapper but just apt-get installed the desktop package and everything was all back to normal.
Got Code?
Or Arch Linux. A "pacman -Syu" will upgrade your system and you don't need to switch distros to switch DE's like *buntu: www.archlinux.org
Of course, you can say that about most distros besides *buntu. Arch is pretty hassle free though.
After all, most of them don't realize that key upgrades in Linux land can be as simple as
/etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`)
via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/"
All of this talk about average desktop users finding such things in some way mysterious or intimidating is nonsense. My grandma uses more complex command lines in her gingerbread recipe.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I've done this upgrade, and apart from it taking ages when downloading packages with a few failing due to connection problems (probably because too many people were downloading) I've had very few problems. Granted, a clean reinstall would have been faster assuming I could have downloaded the cd-image without problems, but I would certainly not term it a nightmare. I did manage to bork my X setup, but that was mostly my own fault (halfway through one way of reinstalling the frglx driver deciding to try another one). Even that I managed to remedy quickly by reinstalling the X.org server.
As to the mentioned example of Opera, I encountered no trouble whatsoever, no crashes, no need to reinstall. All in all the only program I have noticed so far that I needed to reinstall was the fglrx driver for my ATI video card. One oddity I did notice is that I could not install Neverwinter Nights anymore, whereas in Dapper I could install it but not make it playable.
As to the downside(s) of Edgy, there are no messages anymore when booting or shutting down, I'm sure it's possible to change that, but I need to look into that further. Another thing I've noticed is problems with changing file permissions, in particular an impossibility to change groups. Booting also takes longer. I have not noticed any random crashes, something I would associate with the nightmare mentioned in the article. True, this morning I discovered my computer was off, but since the clock on my microwave also was reset, it must have been an electricity issue, not Edgy arbitrarily deciding to shut itself down. Of course for those looking for the imaginary nightmare scenario, it might be that the electricity failure was due to the electric company using Ubuntu and upgrading to Edgy. Somehow I ever so slightly doubt that
sudo update-manager -c
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Now, I love Ubuntu (although I'm more fond of Mark's original goals than the distro itself), so I hate to flame it, but...
How can you notice improved stability within two days after release? That implies that older releases were so fraught with stability problems that you couldn't spend two days with the machine without having to deal with them.
Maybe I live in a sheltered world of vanilla Debian, but... two days? Geez....
May we live long and die out
I used the instructions from here and experienced zero problems. Worked perfectly
I am amazed how many people are reporting problems on here though, the #kubuntu channel on freenode hasn't exactly been getting that many people with upgrade problems either.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
i was just going to ubuntuforums to try and fix mine. Mine wont start X. I was going to find some (re-)installation help with my USB wireless adapter.
I hope you like fdisk with format if you plan to boot another OS
The installer is fscked
...system partition (20GB or so), and a /home partition. If I want to upgrade I just nuke the system ptn. Less issues that way...
I don't really get the *buntu thing. I can set up debian anyway I want. I don't have to download and install another 600MB "upgrade" that doesn't work and breaks everything.
Why the hell does an upgrade from the Net require a gigabyte of free disk space?
--
make install -not war
use gentoo and never do another dist upgrade again
While your advice is technically correct, "throwing your Gentoo box out the window in frustration" is perhaps not the best way to avoid future distribution upgrades.
People should read this before they complain that ubuntu 6.10 is difficult upgrading to. Too often, it's because they screwed up their system with stuff like automatix.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
The other day I downloaded the basic install CD of Ubuntu 'Dapper Drake' and tried to do a "fresh" install over an old Debian partition on my old desktop machine. Everything went smoothly until Step 5. Not wanting to lose my other partitions, I had naturally selected the "manually edit partitions" option (as opposed to "reformat entire hard drive")... and my desktop machine hung. Just froze up. I could hear the CD drive working, but nothing happened. I waited a couple hours (thinking that perhaps it was ridiculously slow)... nothing.
So I did a hard reboot and tried again. Same result. Looked on the Ubuntu site and found bug reports for this problem but no one seemed to be taking it seriously.
Previously, I'd had good luck installing Breezy Badger, so I thought, "no problem, I'll just download a copy of the old Breezy image and install that."
Yeah, right. Anyone know where (or if) Ubuntu archives old versions? Because I couldn't find one anywhere.
Finally I gave up and downloaded a copy of the (then in testing and oh-so-risky) Edgy, and it worked like a charm on the very first try. So I guess the moral is, when some bugs get fixed, more appear elsewhere. Your mileage may vary.
You don't need to switch distros with *buntu either. The different *buntus aren't really different distros, but rather the same distro with different DEs preinstalled. You can easily switch DE at any time, you just need to install the proper meta package (or whatever they call it), containing all necessary packages.
You don't need to switch distros to switch DEs on ubuntu. The difference between the different *buntus are which DE is default. So no matter which you're on, to install KDE install the package kubuntu-desktop, for Gnome ubuntu-desktop,and for XFCE xubuntu-desktop.
:wq
OK, the most important advice is how to uninstall a failed "upgrade" to Edgy. If the failed upgrade leaves the network, terminal console, network and disks intact, how to roll back to a working 5.10 install? Without wiping the machine, and losing unique data?
--
make install -not war
I upgraded using the update manager, and it went fine for me. gksudo "update-manager -c" (found on the other ubuntu thread on /.)
During my first attempt, i lost network connectivity, and it rolled back the changes. I simply tried it again after reseting my modem and it worked just fine.
The real issue is having to have all of these other repos for support like DVD/MP3 and others causing things to muck up. I think this is the real issue. It's not Ubuntu's fault. What I would like to see for the next Ubuntu is for Mark Shuttleworth to pony up the bucks for MP3 support as well as DVD support and possibly Microsoft and Quicktime codec support.
Gorkman
The Gentoo forums are good. The Gentoo Bugzilla, however, is a constant struggle against gatekeepers with a strong disposition against admitting that anything is a bug, and the bias that the distro should be a toy for the developers rather than a toolset for professional sysadmins - and therefore if a workaround is obscure to mere professionals, but obvious to those living half their lives on the IRC channels, well you're just too lame for not knowing about it and the underlying problem doesn't actually need fixing in the packages.
That said, I use Gentoo on a number of servers precisely because it's the most consistently upgradeable distro in the context of a customized production environment. Redhat, Slack, Debian - forget it, you just have to do a fresh install with major OS version changes, and then reinstall all your customizations on top of that. That's more of a headache - over the course of a few years of running a server - than the minor glitches that require either help from the Gentoo forums or persistence in getting the Bugzilla crew to actually accept that bugs should be fixed, rather than denied (they do respond to persistence, usually, eventually).
But I've been hoping Ubuntu would turn out to be the distro that supplanted Gentoo in upgradeability - since hardware is now fast enough that Gentoo's other virtue of custom compilation for speed means less. Hope Ubuntu gets back on track after this. Gentoo is also far out in front is in documentation for more advanced setups - but Ubuntu should naturally catch up in that department over the next year or so.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I upgraded to Edgy on my MBP Parallels partition no problem. I do, however, have a pretty vanilla installation of ubuntu. The only problem that I did find is that time-admin crashes, but that's not a big deal. Danny
Been running Debian for 7 years, no upgrade problems yet. Just saying... :)
(Although, admittedly, a slightly lower number of releases
I figured I would give kubuntu a shot after hearing all the accolades about ubuntu and such. I'm back and I really have to tell you it's probably the worst distribution I've tried in years. I could make at list of at least 10 things that shouldn't be happening in linux anymore. For instance I can suspend in *any other distribution* these days. They've borked the kernel bad enough where it won't suspend for me. Crash after crash. Needless to say I was *truely* unimpressed.
The Inspiron 6000 hasn't been a problem for distros for awhile - onboard Intel or ATi graphics, ipw2200/3945 for wireless NIC, Broadcom 440x (or whatever the gigabit equivalent is) for wired NIC, Intel chipsets all across the mainboard...the only thing that ever gave Linux pause was the weird way laptop IDE hard drives connect to it, and starting with 2.6.17 the code for that's been shipped without any insane patches - and even when it wasn't, that "just" meant that the hard drive was slower than it could have been.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
The upgrade system in Linux always seems problematic so I prefer to backup my home folder and other data and then do an install of any new version and the restore the backed up stuff. Thing are a lot less problematic than.
The only OS that has been relatively free of upgrade woes has been MacOS/OSX.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Ubuntu is not debian stable. If you want your system to be stable and your updates to be smooth, then go for debian stable or stop complaining.
If you prefer top notch applications (Firefox 2.0) over their stable debian version (1.0.4), then go with ubuntu and live with it.
But don't whine about stability issues.
This is the "unstable" version.
Dapper is the "stable" version.
When they release a new "stable" version, you can start complaining. However, Dapper is still recommended for those who want it to Just Work.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Yeah, I used to really like Arch, because it was so light and fast. The problem is, the package manager isn't quite as robust as in Debian, so upgrading packages piecemeal can totally screw up your libraries. On the other hand, the package manager won't touch your config files (unlike Debian), so it is pretty easy to configure, if you know how.
No, this is an offical, stable, release. Nobody knows what the hell you're talking about. If it were marked unstable, then sure--problems would be inevitable. But it's an official, stable release. Anybody who bothered to click on the articles would have ascertained that. Get your facts straight before you post, please.
I was wondering about that. I, too, used the 686-smp kernel, yet now I have that generic kernel. What are you supposed to do to get SMP working again? Or is that done automagically?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Once you boot into the generic kernel, smp will automatically be used as it is "built into" that particular kernel.
I could wait an eternity for everything to compile. I mean, worst case, I start it in the morning, pause it at night so my computer doesn't keep me awake, and restart the next morning.
However, editing config files requires my attention, and most of the time I didn't even need to touch the default files. I still had to review hundreds of files.
If you have the patience for it, go ahead. But it is quite possible to create a system that's friendly to hacking but not so painful to maintain and upgrade.
I tried following that method. Unfortunately the partitioner in Edgy has a bug that makes it say "no root partition" and refuse to let you proceed.
Turned out there was a workaround--I had to delete a couple of partitions using parted and then allow the Edgy installer to create them again and automatically set one as root. It seems that manually telling it which partition to use as root doesn't work at least part of the time.
So yes, there are issues with Edgy. Real issues, not self-inflicted breakage.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Well, sedding sources.list, update and dist-upgrade are what I did on Friday night (2006-10-27), and the next morning I had a few unavailable package errors, and it went downhill from there. Ultimately I gave up on upgrading and did a clean install to a new drive. I'm sure that one of my problems is my shallow understanding of how to use apt-get, though, in my defense, the Help file instructions didn't delve into what to do when 'apt-get dist-upgrade' almost works. It also seems to me that the iso should have a Repair menu item available at boot, or a System/Administration/Repair option while in Live CD mode, or the "Install" application should check for existing installations and make changes in place. Okay, 'nuff said, moving on, to edgy, day 1.
I don't want to reflexively say "No problems here!" as though that has anything to do with the problems others had, but yeah, in my caase I really didn't have problems.
I also had a few things start working that had been broken, probably because Core 2 Duos and the associated chipsets and motherboards are so new, notably the clock speed controls.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
My upgrade went smoothly, albeit long to download all the packages. I'm a Gentoo fan who converted to Ubuntu because I no longer have the time to play with a distro after an upgrade.
I've read about the problems with upgrades. The problem seems to be certain driver incompatibilities. For example, those with Nvidia chips seem not to have problems, while (I think) ATI users do. I am probably off on my examples (although, I'm an Nvidia user) but the underlying issue seems to be hardware conflicts.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
That's been my experience, agreed. Though note actually that upgrades "on a DAILY basis" are probably easier for the distributor to handle, not harder--the typical developer probably tests the case of upgrading a package by one version number at a time, but probably doesn't as frequently test upgrades that skip several versions at once.
Vista will support all your hardware and it will just work - out of the box.
That sounds a lot like what M$ was promising in Win95. And 98. And 98SE. And ME. And 2k. And XP. Funny you believe it.
Solaris has been there since 1983 and a large enterprise company is backing it up making sure it has only quality code in it. Everything is documented well, it offers you free Java development tools giving you one helluva development environment to work with. Sun goes through all the code that goes into Open Solaris so the quality is top notch. Open Solaris might be what we are looking for. I'm afraid it's time to say goodbye to GNU!
Yay! Free java! Fuck that. Get that shit out of here. Opensolaris? As in, "We append the word Open to something and maybe someone will download it?". Solaris has it's upsides, but one thing it is not, is clean.
I wish it was FUD. Then I'd have a nice, working Edgy system and I wouldn't have wasted the last couple of days trying to install it then having to restore.
I once did the "emerge --flag-that-tells-you-what-will-be-emerged somepackage" and nothing problematic showed up. I was feeling all set to do the emerge, but then had to handle something else for a few minutes (half hour or so), and returned and typed the "emerge somepackage" and went away to do something else in the meantime. Murphy's Law intervened, of course, and when the emerge started, libc had changed so there were several hundred (?) packages that needed to be upgraded. But that was only part of the problem. Libc got installed ok, I think, but then everything seemed to hang. I got back and tried to fix things, in the process only making things worse. Eventually I gave up and (since this was the second time gentoo had forced a complete install on me) installed debian. Happily all my personal stuff was in /home and survived ok.
Since running debian/ubuntu, I have had a couple minor problems (this machine is running a fresh install of eft) but nothing like that.
Edgy was just released, thus it is considered "stable" since it is not a release candidate.
Fortunatly this doesn't matter to me,since unfortunately Debian and derivatives will not work with my wireless card. The only distro i Found to work "out of the box" was Suse (trimmed down to what i wanted installed) after i loaded my drivers into ndiswrapper.
I like the fact that ubuntu can fit onto one cd / dvd and wish i could use it. These "everthing but the kitchen sink" distros don't help the FOSS movement, people look at a typical install of Redhat / Suse and see 5+ CD's and think that their computer can't handle that size operating system ( i actually had people say that on some support house calls).
Plus Ubuntu does have the cleaner look to it than most distros, although you don't have as much choice during the install as i would like ( like on a normal install not installing the sound system) for really customized install, maybe this could be remedied by downloading the "alternate install cd".
All in all Ubuntu is relatively stable, ANY OS will have quirks that need to be worked out.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but are you on crack??
The X.org upgrade from monolithic to modular was simple, if you had basic reading comprehension skills, and the ability to follow simple written instructions. This is based on my experience in converting an x86 desktop, x86 laptop, amd64X2 desktop and Amd64 laptop. You assertion that it was "practically unsupported" is and was a crock o'shit. And no, I'm not a CS degree type. Just a regular "Joe-six-pack" who happens to fiddle with computers.
FWIW. In my minf, the biggest advantage Gentoo has is it's documentation. Unless you're really out in the weeds, most everything you can do is documented with FAQs, How-Tos and forum posts.
The move from GCC 3.4 to 4.0 was a bit trickier then most illiterates could handle, but if you can read, even that was fairly pain free.
Gentoo isn't for everyone. Much the same as Slackware or Debian or Red Hat or Linspire isn't. But please, try to keep the flood of bullshit about the differences to a minimum, and maybe even based in reality.
-Cranky SOB expecting to be moderated as a Troll spewing FUD and other nause (But I feel better now)
Admittedly, I've only done an upgrade on one machine, but from Dapper -> Edgy using the `update-manager -c -d' command, or whatever it was, everything went beautifully.
:)
And I use Xubuntu, primarily, so I have to say, contra the claims of the main post, the Xubuntu upgrade went pretty well... This may or may not be related to the fact that I also keep the ubuntu-desktop metapackage installed, even though that leads to overkill in some areas
Redhat must really be sweating to keep putting out these press releases about Ubuntu "nightmares", "debacles", etc. I've never used it myself, but alot of folks recommend it.
Edgy Eft is definitely faster at startup and at shutdown. It's definitely the best Ubuntu live CD yet.
:)
I really like the Ogg Theora video of Mr. Nelson Mandela explaining what Ubuntu means.
1)I had no issues on the clone AMD 1.4GHz MP dual/tyan. Sound, 3D Graphics, Dvd player, and USB work.
2)I had no issues on the DELL(Intel P4 3.0GHz). Sound, 3D Graphics, Dvd player, and USB work. Flash-plugin works in Firefox.
3)The live CD for Edgy Eft on the HP 1.3GHz P4 with an NVIDIA 6600 and a CRT Monitor gave me issues though. I couldn't see the Gnome Login, but I heard the login sound.
WARNING:dvdrip hangs while ripping a track and it gave me some DBUS/Gnomevfsdaemon connection errors. The Firefox Torbutton extension doesn't install in the Edgy Eft.
WISHLIST: It would be nice to see Lives(non-linear video editor), Cinellera(non-linear video editor), and xdvdshrink(DVD9toDVD5 tool) actually work from ubuntu repositories without resorting to third party repositories.
Conclusion: I prefer Ubuntu Dapper for the moment, but I do plan to upgrade to Eft only after I know the apps I like on Dapper install/run without issues on Eft. I have nothing but praise for Ubuntu and will continue to influence others to use Ubuntu and especially Dapper
Of the five ubuntu systems I know of, three failed the upgrade to Dapper. The three failed machines were all running SMP-kernels, which seemed to cause the issue.
I think the problem was somehow related to pcmcia-cs package. Anyway, I'm not going to be among the first to upgrade this time...
Upgrade was also no problem on two machines (Laptop and Desktop) using the update manager. However with the exceptions of Firefox 2.0 and Gaim 2+ I can't say that too much is actually 'edgy' in this realease...
;)
Getting Beryl to work was simple! Regardless smooth video playback at full screen even with researched settings still is a bit lacking.
In hind site I think it would be best to say that Ubuntu with their recent releases have been so ground breaking in getting Linux on the average desktop that maybe too many people were expecting either the second coming or the 'ultimate windows killer' from this one. None the less as long as there is never an Ubuntu Genuine Advantage spyware or a silly OSx "my company's hardware only" policies then Ubuntu will remain my OS thru and thru.
Maybe its time to focus on Damn Small Ubuntu?
try { println( SigString ); } catch( Exception e ) { println( 'Who cares?' ); }
It wasn't a nightmare, but it's not painless either. The upgrade itself went effortlessly. I followed their instructions for upgrading on the download page, and downloading all the new files took about four hours, but there were no problems with the process. It also updated to Firefox 2.0, the new OpenOffice, and so on as part of it. Settings were saved. So far, so good.
The biggest problem for me was that it lost the wireless connection. Judging by the forums, a lot of people had that problem. lsmod shows that my Broadcomm wireless is loaded, but Edgy doesn't even know it's there. One of the reasons I'm so calm about it is that I didn't do the upgrade on my main computer. The problem would be affecting me a whole lot more if it was interfering with my daily work.
To be fair, I think we need to remember that the Ubuntu folks promise near-perfection on their whole number versions. This is 6.1 Obviously, I and everyone else would prefer perfection right the way along, but upgrading to interim versions is a trade-off between having the latest and helping the debugging process.
I went through the whole apt-get dist-upgrade procedure expecting the upgrade to be a complete mess. It was :) 30 or so packages, including "ubuntu-minimal" were held back, my wireless card wasn't working anymore, and it kept the old kernel I was using on Dapper (2.6.15).
At that point I decided it was easier to do a fresh install rather than spend the hours or it would take to fix it. The fresh install was a success, and everything has been working seamlessly since.
What would be interesting if each package implemented a unit test of sorts that tested for expected state after it was installed. This way, people with borked installations could send their unit tests report to Ubuntu, and fixes could be targeted in a quicker manner.
Having been a Unix System Administrator for 19 years, I have learned that letting the new release "upgrade" your old machine is a bad idea and should be avoided. Here are my reasons why:
1. The vendor can never test against all reasonable end-user modifications. There's not enough time.
2. So, unless your system is completely stock, the upgrade path for *your* system hasn't been tested.
3. And if the upgrade path hasn't been tested, then there's a good chance it may break something.
The way to get perfect results every time is to assume ALL upgrades will actually be complete re-installs, and plan your configuration accordingly. Done correctly, your re-install won't involve losing any user data or important configuration files.
This also makes the vendors' life easier, as they don't have to test their upgrade process against all previous versions. The vendor may be deluded into believing that they can handle upgrades without re-installing, but they will only manage it for a little while. It's easy to do if you only have one or two earlier releases, but the complications expand geometrically as the number of prior releases goes up.
I've done three upgrades to Edgy on three different computers owned by three different people. It's worked perfectly all three times.
Keep the faith, share the code
Downgrade a failed Edgy 6.10 "upgrade" down to Dapper 6.04?
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make install -not war
As someone who works on Apache ant, yes, we like bugreps that are replicable, and prefer patches with tests.
:(
At the same time, we try and test our stuff, internally and externally. But the moment an x.0 release ships, we still get lots of bugreps. And you know why that is? Because when the x.0 release ships, a lot more people grab the app and use it. And unlike beta testers, these are not experienced developers. They are people who (in the Java context) dont know that the CLASSPATH env variable is a recipie for disaster, that you shouldnt have trailing backslashes or inner quotes in it. We have people whose Windows PC is an inconsistent mess and things just dont work on them. We get people who are running jpackaged and self-installed ant distros side by side, and get surprised that ant.sh delegates to jpackage installations, so the upgrade doesnt appear to take.
The issue is not that we dont beta test our software, it is that the testers, having a certain level of competence/experience, don't set up the apps in a pathologically bad way. Its not that the code doesn't work, it is that we cannot test all configurations, and that is what burns us.
Operating systems have the same problem only multiplied.
One thing I dont agree with is closing bugs unless they are fixed, or unless the team has made a WONTFIX decision. The troublespot is WORKSFORME, because, yes, that is the problem: code that works on some configurations and not others. There is a great ongoing bugrep in Eclipse, that says "LATER bugs get ignored", which is how that team works. Marking something as later doesnt just postpone the fix, it hides it. In Ant, we leave all bugs open until closed propery. Which is why we have 500+ bugreps right now, I guess
-Steve
Apache Ant dev team; Author "Ant in Action"
Despite that there are many reasons to use Gentoo instead of Kubuntu - after all if you wanted the easy life you wouldn't be using Linux in the first place.
I don't think this is necessarily true. I didn't switch to Linux because I wanted to make things harder on myself. I switched for many reasons, including being fed up with spyware and Windows just being a complete pain. I wanted to learn more about computers, and so I switched to Gentoo. After a year and a half on Gentoo, I couldn't take it anymore. An entire system shouldn't break when you edit your cflags, and I'd just had to do one revdep-rebuild too many. I was tired of networking breaking at every upgrade--the classic paradox of needing to get online to fix your networking. I was tired of mplayer breaking at every upgrade. I was tired of having my computer's power drained by constantly having to compile updates in the background.
So I switched to Ubuntu. I've never been happier, because I've finally found what I want in a Linux distro. I want a stable operating system, which was why I wanted to switch to Linux in the first place--to get away from Windows's fluctuations over which I had no control. I have a powerful operating system that does everything I need. What I love about Ubuntu is that a user can have as much or as little control over the operating system as s/he wants. Ubuntu will take care of things for you, but the power of Linux is still readily accessible. Maybe it's not bleeding edge, but I can always compile a bleeding edge CVS snapshot if I ever really want to. (Though I think things started going wrong when I had quite a few packages set to ~x86...)
My time is precious to me, and I'm happy to be using a system where I don't have to micromanage every package I want to install. Want video? sudo aptitude install mplayer. And it just WORKS.
Ubuntu has made using my computer a pleasure, as opposed to a second job. Ubuntu isn't just for the non-technical. Linux doesn't have to make your life harder, and if we all insist that it must be that way, then Linux has no chance in the mainstream. Let those of us who want a distro like Ubuntu be.
The system I tried it on was one on which I had installed 6.06 a couple of weeks ago, and had barely used. It was commercial consumer-grade hardware (an HP box). I think that the only things I had added to the original 6.06 install was that I had updated to KDE 3.5.5 and amaroK 1.4.3.
So I followed the instructions on the Kubuntu wiki for upgrading from 6.06 to 6.10. The last step is "reboot". I did so and... where on Earth has my GUI gone? I get a CLI login prompt (which mysteriously says "6.06 LTS" not "6.10"). I log in and try "startx" thinking that maybe I need to do that the first time. Error messages about there being no X server.
So I wiped the disk and installed 6.10 from scratch. (Sure, if I had had the time, I could presumably have figured out what was wrong and maybe even fixed it. But sometimes discretion is indeed the better part of valour.) That install went fine. But I sure won't be attempting to upgrade my main machine (which is a dual-core 64-bit custom box). Pity, because there are already packages available for edgy that aren't available for dapper. But I think I'll be sticking with my tried-and-true upgrade process for important machines: no more than once a year, install the new OS to a brand new drive and gradually move everything over.
Are proprietary software installs (such as the proprietary software Opera web browser) being cited as a source of problems for upgrading Ubuntu GNU/Linux systems? While I can see how that could pose a problem, the irony is more interesting because I remember the language used in the press release talking about Opera's availability for Ubuntu GNU/Linux: "Ubuntu will always be free, and will not have restrictive licenses associated with it.". I'm guessing this refers to the cognitive dissonance of a special repository for non-free packages and using free to mean gratis rather than the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify (which would include gratis distribution if one can get a copy from a friend).
Digital Citizen
How do you turn your computer off? Seriously? If you select Log Out, the closest you can get is Hibernation.
After a while, I figured out that selecting "Enable actions menu" in the Login Screen administrative app enables these logout options.
Obviously.
I hope that's just a broken default that I got from my install when it was in beta, because that is really stupid otherwise.
Yeah, it happened to me to, but only because I did not notice a warning message at an emerge sync earlier that stated that MY PROFILE WILL BECOME OBSOLETE in a couple of weeks. After I figured it out, I just modified the symlink (3 seconds) and everything was back to normal :P
Don't hate Gentoo. As long as you know what you're doing, and you actually look at the display, you're in the clear.
YMMV, but I upgraded my Dapper installation to Edgy over a FreeNX-connection from the coach at home. Only minor things like 32-bit Acrobat Reader missing its pixbuf-loaders etc. Wasn't a nightmare at all.
Those are valid points. You just hit upon some of what makes Ubuntu so appealing to new users: the small size, ease of configuration and so on. My point is that we owe a greater duty to new users to make sure that what they are installing is more or less "quirk free".
But even then, "quirk" is a bit of an understatement--we're talking about breaking net access, crashing the X server and so on. It's semi-serious stuff that would leave a new user absolutely baffled. The intermediate users will know to check the forums to solve any problems, and the advanced ones will already know what to do. No, it's the people who are picking up Linux for the first time with whom we want to make the best impression. That's why these upgrade problems are so hurtful to new adoption of the OS--they affect the very people who we're trying to welcome into the fold.
But will Namco sue?
Not quite true. Dapper had extreme problems when (as an example) you installed Ubuntu, then the KDE desktop on top of it.
Not as simple as most think.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
When I upgraded there were a couple of packages it wasn't quite sure what to do with involving python-libxml, etc. but it was relatively straight forward to get it straightened out. I used aptitude to do everything.
I also upgraded a Xubuntu box with no issues whatsoever. But it was completely stock I don't think I had installed a single package outside of it's default configuration.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
When Vista comes out and people report various upgrade & install troubles, I wonder if it will get the same kid-glove treatment that Ubuntu is getting now? Hardly. I'm sure there will be no end of self-righteous linux-is-great / windows-is-crap posts from people.
I'm not intending to troll.
My point is: that type of attitude is not helpful to operating system advancement in general, no matter if it's linux or Windows.
I always went to download the CD first, then install it for fear that the internet may fail. I was surprised to find out that even after installing from CD, and while I explicitly told the installer to "NOT GET UPDATED LIBRARIES FROM THE NET", it still does so anyways. Fine...I'll wait, as my broadbands only picking up Ubuntu at a measly 20-40 kb/s (I figure its due to everyone trying to get it). That failed, as the installer crapped out. Therefore, I installed it by booting it up from the CD, wiped out my hard drive, and installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu. Got everything seemingly working. So I went and performed the usual Nvidia driver installation (apt-get), and on the next boot, the OS cannot boot into the GUI as it cannot detect my video card anymore. Enough. Went back to Dapper, which was effortless. From what I understand, Dapper is being supported longer than Edgy (for 3 years), way longer than Edgy. I'll see how Fiesty Fawn turns out.
I tried to upgrade my ubuntu box for the past 2 nights but the installer gives up when it can't connect to http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/. I'm not interested in upgrading if it means the non-free codecs stop working. Anyone else run into this? --Hc
Funny, I had started with Ubuntu, and then installed the "Kubuntu" and "Xubuntu" packages with no problems, and was able to switch between them whenever I wanted.
No, you just have glibc change and have to recompile everything. Currently my gentoo system has been compiling for three days straight and isn't done. // Fiddle around with getting GCC 4.1 installed and configured first...
;-)
emerge -eav system
emerge -eav world
This takes a LONG time, my friends.
Ironically, I was only in Gentoo so I could use it to backup my Dapper installation before upgrading to Edgy! Thanks to Gentoo, I've missed out on all of this hell.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Is that why many people had to install Tiger from scratch in order to for it to work properly? Sounds like more BS from lying Apple fanbois.
I thought this was supposed to be a "detailed report" . . . . ?
OK so you do seem overly cranky. Some sort of raw nerve there or something?
In a discussion about Ubuntu I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the recent Gentoo upgrades have been a pain in the ass. For people on the ~amd64 profile it was practically unsupported. Maybe you were luck in your mix of packages that it just worked for you, but it was not a simple case of following written instructions for a lot of people in that position. Lots of ~amd64 packages broke during the upgrade and there were a lot of people who got screwed trying to fix them. Maybe it was their "simple written" instructions that you ended up following? You don't think these guides spring up out of thin air do you? They are generally written by the people who experienced the pain of doing the upgrade first.
And yes, my upgrade was relatively painfree, but I think that is because the x86 and ~x86 profiles are a lot more mainstream than their amd64 counterparts, and because I waited for a couple of weeks at which point there were lots of simple howtos available.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I upgraded two systems ok and my laptop will be next.
/cdrom/cdromupgrade" and it asks if you would like to use the network which I thought was cool because if there happens to be slightly newer packages out it can incorporate them immediately. Great.
I downloaded the ISO because I had more than one machine to upgrade and thought it would be nice to have the CD around for sharing with newbies.
I ran "sudo bash
I expected it to whiz through and pick up most deb's from the CD, but the curious thing is that it seemed to prefer to download them. I have no idea why, but the upgrades did work.
Never mind upgrading, it won't even install on Dapper partition.
Installation on spare partition went without problems, but when I wanted to install it on Dapper's partition wiping Dapper off completely, installer kept moaning something about lack of root partition and no matter what I tried I coudn't install it.
I echo that!
The horror. The horror.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
My upgrade from Dapper to Edgy went perfectly, just as Hoary to Breezy and Breezy to Dapper did (I've been on the same installation since Hoary). The only 'nightmare' I had during the upgrade was having to work on my wifes Windows XP machine while gksu "update-manager -c" said that Edgy was 4 hours and 1600-something packages away.
I didn't have any problems with my upgrade after I was finished, though the process itself was kind of a pain because halfway through the dist upgrade I got some major dependency errors. My solution to this was to uninstall the unsatisfiable packages and then hold back the ones which were asking for them. After updating that far, I reinstalled the packages post update and everything worked fine. That took a few minutes, but overall the process was not hard.
Unfortunately, I recently noticed that VNC does not work anymore because of an issue with xfonts. I have heard this is a common problem, though, but I haven't figured out how to solve it yet. I'm not going to give it too much effort since I think I'm going to play around with another distro soon.
I installed Ubuntu 6.06, and the next day after, they released Edgy.
I went to the upgrade tool at my work (laptop on a secondary table) and told it to upgrade.
The Internet connection there is WAY overloaded, and I would have only gotten 20k/sec there.
Took the laptop home, upgraded to Edgy on my cable modem.
Took a while (as the average download was a blazing 75k/sec) but overall it worked beautifully.
I'd installed FF2.0 before the upgrade, and after the upgrade, Firefox shows the Mozilla branding again (and not the Debian branding).
I'm not discounting anyone else's problems but it worked great!!! for me..
= Grow a brain...
Contrary to many people, my upgrade from Dapper to Edgy was outright boring.
The only thing that caused a brief stop was the XFCE bug (I have several environments installed besides the default Gnome, mostly for demonstration to the uninitiated), could not install the xfonts-intl-european package - the bug was also described in the Xubuntu release notes I think. Altering between apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade a couple of times seemed to solve it.
Otherwise, everything was painless. Compiz works, the fingerprint reader works, sound and both network interfaces work. A previous upgrade messed up my Estonian keyboard settings - not this one. And the Dapper install had lots of extras added to the default set of software, so this was far from a minimal install.
Just to report that not everybody ran into problems when upgrading.
I upgraded my Athlon XP, VIA chipset box using the instructions on kubuntu.org and on reboot the kernel panicked immediately. So I burned an install CD - same thing, the kernel on that panicked too. Eventually I rescued my system using a 6.06 install CD, chrooting, apt-get installing the kernel source and rolling my own. I have no idea what the crash was - ACPI was mentioned in the final bit of panic report on the screen, but I've used ACPI kernels before and since with no problems. And nobody else seems to be experiencing this... Perhaps it's flaky hardware, but it's weird that I've never seen it with any other kernel build.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I've worked on or with a number of major open-source projects. Most of them have strict QA guidelines. I'm talking about Gentoo, KDE, Debian, etc. The problem is that you're talking about an operating system (Ubuntu) assembled from hundreds of independent software packages, which may be running on millions of different hardware configurations. Shit happens. Even Microsoft, with its massive budget, huge team, and total control over all the code that forms their OS and desktop rarely gets it right the first time around.
If you have specific complaints about specific dev teams, go ahead and make them. But don't make asinine generalizations about thousands of developers who are volunteering their time to develop free software.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
2006 has not been a vintage year for Linux
...when you know components are going to fail, you can design the system to automatically adapt and thereby mitigate the effects of that failure."
At least 2 major dist. have had significant problems with their new releases.
Perhaps Linux should adopt the program that these guys are working on:
http://www.physorg.com/news81096007.html
"... through software that allows the computer to survive radiation-caused flaws or errors
I imagine my next comp. having 4 cores, 2 of which will be constantly running checks on the other 2, updating, replacing etc. as necessary
Heaven! ( and think how small the forums will become!)
Well, a clean install is not such a bad idea for a desktop/laptop. If you've planned ahead for it from the beginning, it requires no wiping of your data whatsoever.
/home. Try it out for a while. If all is well, then you can go ahead and mount (3) as /home, and boom, you've upgraded your OS to the new version/distro with a clean install and no wiping of data.
/home as your home partition on the new OS, do this from your home directory: .* dotfilesbackup
/boot, storing kernel images and grub there. But don't forget to use parted to change the partition type to FAT before trying to install grub on it.
Separate your logical partition into five partitions: 1) a "Primary OS" partition, 2) a "Secondary OS" partition, 3) a "/home" partition, 4) a swap partition, and if you like to compile stuff 5) a "/usr/local" partition.
Install your favorite OS to the first partition. Then when time comes to try out how a new OS or upgrade really works out (not via some live-CD garbage, but the real thing), install it in your "Secondary OS" partition without mounting (3) as
Then when time comes to try out yet another new distro/upgrade, install it on partition (1)... you get my meaning.
One more hint---before mounting
mkdir dotfilesbackup
cp -r
Just in case your old settings cause some sort of panic in the newer version of $DESKTOPENVIRONMENT.
Oh, and if you've got a Dell, use that weird "Dell" partition as your
New to Linux? Don't try any of the above.
damn
+1 Hero
How did I not know that?
Cheers.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Seriously out of all the millions of /. readers I can't believe not even a single person has posted regarding the whole Core 2 Duo/JMicron thing (and yes I did a discussion search).x -source-2.6.17/+bug/57502 8 3&page=2
For more information:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Core_2_Duo_Support
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/68612
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linu
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2856
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
I upgraded my linux desktop at work from dapper to edgy. During the upgrade process, it asked me to uninstall a ton of packages as they had been obsoleted, which I naturally OK'd. However, the ancient ATI Rage128 card required the "ati" driver, now gone. I'm linux literate, so I just logged in at the commandline, apt-got the correct package, and started X back up, only took me 10 minutes. But could grandma do that? Not in a million years.
I use the ubuntu 6.10 alternate CD to boot my Dell 640m and my notebook stopped. The message "time-of-day clock stopped" was displayed. I had to take out the battery to clear the BIOS... Isn't that the worst scenario we can encounter?
Yeah, I did an 'in-place' upgrade from 6.06 Dapper using the recommended method ( gksu "update-manager -c" ), and it was really, really smooth on a Core 2 Duo (but only running 32-bit mode) Sony VAIO laptop.
/home directories on a separate partition, so if things really "Go South", a relatively quick clean and full re-install can be performed with the user data and preferences left intact!...
The only thing that was problematic was the fact that all Flash sites would crash Firefox...! This was something which appears to have had to do with a setting in the xorg.conf file, I followed some tips as shown here, but doing the opposite and changing the value from 16 up to 24. Smooth sailing ever since!
There probably are some more exotic combinations of motherboards, graphic cards and disk arrays that will not be working great, but so far, so good here!!
One thing that is really working in case of disaster is to keep
Z.
Install and Ubuntu using the following partition scheme: /home ]
[ 512MB swap | 15GB / (root) | (the rest of your GB)
When a new version of Ubuntu comes out (or even another distro of your choice), erase your swap and root, keeping home. I've been using Linux for years, and trust me, this is the easiest and most universal way to keep your files.
As a side note, I never put important stuff outside my home dir and software raid my home dir to a separate hard drive, just in case a drive fails. You can configure your partitions and software raid in the debian/ubuntu installer.
-Joe
I always do a fresh install from the CD. I have learned the hard way that upgrading *any* distro through the command line method is a sure way to disaster. Primarily, packages compiled outside of the preferred distro install method break. Often, other incompatibilities bork the upgrade too.
It was flawless for me. Mac Mini, x86 1.66 ghtz. Beryl, AIGLX, everything: working perfectly. My classmates, seeing all the crazy features my desktop had, assumed I switched to the OSX that the machine came installed with. When I showed them the features that OSX still doesn't have (how's that skydome/cube going for ya, OSX?), they were mystified.
The problem here is that Linux doesn't have a multibillion dollar marketing team lauding all the cool features it has on the desktop. I'm off topic.
It's over a decade since I first crouched over an enormous pile of 3.5" floppy disks containing all the disk images of Linux that I had painfully downloaded via a then blazing fast 9600bps modem.
Nothing has changed!!!!!!!!!
Sure the hardware has attained incredible speeds but one still spends untold hours coping with systme borking dist upgrades gone wrong.
Buggy / unfinished OS installers? Yep, still got'em.
I've got an enoourmous pile of floppies / cd's / dvd's of every imaginable Linux distros dating back from 6 hours ago right back to 1992 & none of them acknowledge or address dependency hell.
When are Linux Distro authors going to improve their game on this?
Seems like until somebody address's the fundamental design flaw of complete anarchy in Linux land then it will never change.
I've waited all these years for a clear winner to emerge from the chaos but to this day there are just more & more & more half assed distro's appearing. It's fucking inescusable in this day & age for Companies like Novell & Ubuntu to continue to release distro's that have these BASIC design problems. Even bloody M$ have done soemthing to address dependency hell!
I've read all the zealotry & "but you should use 'x' distro" until my retina's burned & I just don't buy it any more.
IMHO Linux has missed it's opportunity as a desktop OS.
Seen the light & switching to Mac OS X...
I have never had any success dist-upgrading a Debian distro. Granted, I've only tried it twice -- once with stock Debian and once with an earlier Ubuntu release. I hosed my system both times. Now when it's time to upgrade I always do a fresh install.
Well if you want eg. LiveCD, then there already an unofficial project which aims on creating Debian Etch live cd. http://live.debian.net/debian-cd/current/i386/
You can install Debian from: USB-stick floppy disk (network install, 2 x 1.44MB floppies) 1 x MiniCD etc.
They do a fresh install.
I've always done it that way. Be it Linux or Windows. There are just too many things that can go wrong.
Back up your files and then do a clean install. In the end you'll probably spend less time getting your new OS up and running like you want it to.
I'm running Edgy and overall it's going quite well. It has a few bugs, but they can't be blamed on an upgrade.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
You're better off with Debian Unstable. Testing often gets held up on package upgrades because the package you want is being held up in Unstable due to the Commodore 64 and Intel 8088 versions not compiling.....
Either way, I prefer Ubuntu over Debian. 6 months isn't long to wait for a very stable distro with new software. And I never upgrade an OS. I always do a clean install. (with the above Debian mentions being exceptions).
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
The Dapper release was delayed for extra testing, while Edgy started late but shiiped according to the original every 6 months schedule.
I upgraded two systems from Hoary to Dapper without an issue, but the one I did a dist-upgrade to Edgy is broken.
As with most IT projects testing is critical!
That sentence is irrelevant to what I said. RTFC next time.
Go on IRC and ask how to fix it next time. I haven't had to reinstall a debian system for YEARS now, with very frequent upgrades, third-party software, and unstable versions of packages. Chances are, they'll be able to explain what you did that made it not work, too.
I wouldn't use Debian unstable for a computer that I needed to be working on a daily basis. Most of the time it's fine but now and again they'll release a big "break everything" upgrade of a bunch of packages, and you've suddenly lost four hours of your day sorting the mess out. I've been very happy with a Kubuntu desktop - the packages are up-to-date enough for me. I've held off for a few days on upgrading to Edgy on my office PC just in case the upgrade didn't go smoothly... glad I did now :P
I mean, it's not like upgrading a server-oriented distro where all you care about is if [Apache|MySQL|Tomcat|Postfix|Bind] comes back to life and acts properly on reboot. I upgraded from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft on my Dell laptop, and it involved some breakage and googling and stuff, but it's not out of line from my experience with upgrading other desktop-oriented distros. At least there's a lot of community resources available for Ubuntu, and since it has a huge userbase, it's fairly likely that someone else has run into the same issue before.
Edgy Eft is definitely worth the try, but if you don't have a few hours to spend downloading updates, installing, rebooting, finding breakages and fixing 'em, then just use VMware Server or Workstation or some other VM package and plop it in there.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
I have NEVER had a slackware upgrade fail...EVER!
Since the Upgrade proces sis really just a huge extention of the normal single package upgrade/install process, and its time proven its never a problem.
The Box that runs my domain started out as slack 8 box and has been upgraded to each follwing releases as Patrick has put them out and is frequently synced against Slack current inbetween.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
What are you talking about? I've been running modular xorg on ~amd64 for months with no problems whatsoever.
How were you screwed exactly?
How hard is it to emerge -C nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel && emerge nvidia-drivers ?
I've had issues with every apt-get dist-uprade of Ubuntu I've ever done. I at least give it a try each time before resorting to a complete reinstall.
I found that doing a dist-upgrade to Edgy actually was the one time since all the way back to Warty that I had success (with a desktop install) and was able to reboot, load X and use my computer. However, my system was noticeably very sluggish and I went the reinstall route anyway just to see if there was an improvement, which there was (dramatically).
Dist-upgrades with server installs have never been a problem for me.
Extreme? Could you go into some details, maybe provide a source, because I installed KDE over Ubuntu 6.06 and I didn't have any problems whatsoever.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Well, the box the problem is not the emerge nvidia-drivers. It's the removal of X6.9 and the installation of modular x7.0. There is no way to get nvidia-drivers without an upgrade of the X server. As they're independent packages this is pretty shit, and that is how I got screwed. I've hit a driver bug in the glx that we're using, and needed to check the latest glx to see if Nvidia had fixed it. The fact that I can't check the new driver without reinstalling X suggests that the package system is not working the way that it should. And the fact that the nvidia-glx package has been deleted from tree and replaced by something with a direct dependency on X is unforgivable.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I don't hate Gentoo, but then I'm not a fanboy either (and I'm not suggesting that you are!). The first rule of computing is/should be "do no harm", and emerge --sync broke that rule in this case. Deleting a configuration file that is in use is never a good idea IMHO. And it wasn't a matter of me noticing a warning message; I do sync's as a cron job (which are suppose to be harmless in the first place).
Actually I am a bit of a gentoo fanboy, but I'm not one of those "foaming at the mouth over their distro" type of fanboys. I can accept constructive criticism, especially since I've been through the same experience (started modifying the portage python files to debug so I can figure out what the hell is going on ... AND I DON'T KNOW PYTHON, LOL). I mean, it seemed absurd to me that a profile would just "disappear" all of a sudden, and emerge doesn't give a real error message stating that, just crashes with a "null where it is not supposed to be" type exception - can't give you the exact error message right now-.
In the end, every distro has it's strong points and weak points, and right now, It's pretty hard for me to part with "emerge -something-" whenever I want to install or update some package.
When I used a CD to upgrade, my keyboard wouldn't work. When using apt-get, Gnome hangs just before login. Gnome partition editor is also non working on Edgy CD. I'll reinstall the previous Ubuntu release, and wait until the next one arrives.
j
Personally I don't see what all the fuss about "releases" is all about. If I wanted to reinstall my OS I would still be running windows.
Instead I have ran Debian Sid for the last 2 years, my system is updated weekly by doing apt-get dist-upgrade.
Doing a new release and having to deal with problems involved in updating to that release is just insane. Just having to change your sources.list with every release is a pain, then you have to wonder just what is going to break when you upgrade.
If Ubuntu would stop trying to reinvent the wheel and do things the Debian way, with a release that is actually stable people wouldn't be having all the problem they are having.
If you want bleeding edge apps on a stable system run Debian Sid or Kanotix.
Debian Sid LXDE Firefox 3.6.4
GNU/Linux and Firefox, surfing the internet safely.
There was nothing totally hideous about the upgrade. However it was a total pain in the butt from the beginning of the hiccup of the download, the repeated administration of disp-upgrade to get everything down, the apt-get clean and the dpkg --configure -a to finally get the last two packages.
And then no X. AND NO LINKS either. However lynx did work, as did the XP on HDA!.
You have to all too often apt-get xorg xserver with the final suffix of your graphical card. Granted that was a lot easier than Corel 2.o for me and editing X files, this was no stroll through the park and took way too much time.
Having said that - the Edgy Eft is not bloatware, it just feels more right. And several nagging little things have disappeared, cruft that was - "oh, I would like to fix that my way - but I don't want to research how to do it right now is just gone. I was really set to just go Mac because I grew so weary of RPM hell, and well, I won't upgrade right off the bat again for a long while.
They will learn from this I am sure.
Peace, Mark
The upgrade problems point to the need for another kind of testing tool. A tool that will test the complete distribution.
It seems to me that Ubuntu's programmers were willing but bunches of cascading oddball problems exceeded the time and programmer diligence available.
I have been working with Ruby on Rails, which is an environment where huge chunks of function execute with very little detail visible to me as a programmer. It turns out, it is essential to set up tests. You depend on tests to alert you when something you have done has unexpected consequences and breaks stuff elsewhere.
So how would a "distribution testing tool" work? Well, in the end it would exersize each one of your applications and compare the results with a results file. File an error report and download a fix script or fix instructions.
Hmm, lots more to think about here. Is this a wheel needing re-inventing?
Under ubuntu it is recommended that you do a "sudo update-manager -c -d" rather than try to do a dist-upgrade. As I understand doing a dist-upgrade without "reading the readme" has always been risky on Debian based systems.
I tried frequent updates with testing, but grew tired of the constant problems. I couldn't imagine doing the same with unstable. The choice comes down to: Do you want frequent minor pain, or infrequent major pain? I prefer not having to adminster my box weekly. But, to each their own.
Let's be serious. The first release of WinXP (the "evolution" of Win16 based on "experience"... remember?) was an utter calamity.
How many of you said, "wait for the Service Pack!" -- and how many of us listened? Microsoft called it "normal abberrations in architecture".
What's worse is that we actually paid for the XP ugprade.
It's a platform release, stupid. Taking-down the entire kernel structure and re-building it is no small matter. Frankly, putting the entire operation through >apt< is an accomplishment in itself.
Ubuntu—a leader in the Lin-friendly world—has done their part to make a platform that is not only accessible to most every skill-level, but also GUARANTEES updates on a regular basis. That's quite a deadline. Any dev-house will tell you that committing to a regulated update schedule is, in itself, a nightmare. The fact that the Ubuntu staff has upheld this commitment is laudible, honorable and quite frankly, amazing.
Xubuntu Dapper is what sold me on the Ubuntu distro. Ubuntu is nice, but a bit too nice for me. (like an overbearing grandmother) I picked X-distro for its thin footprint and largely transparent framework. My biggest gripe was the time the upgrade took to download. (files downloading at 56k speeds when I have a >2Mb/s cable modem) I even interrupted the process at least half a dozen times, and it still came back up. It was no nightmare, but just a frustrating series of consequences that I had limited ability to control.
Biting the bullet, I grabbed the iso for the alt-install CD. Mounting the image, I resumed the update where the downloads left off and it's now running perfectly. PERFECTLY!
Beta testers know... it works when it works, no matter the label. Ubuntu is just honoring their primary commitment. It doesn't work for everybody, but clearly it works.
That's what this community is for!
Stop lashing out and start reaching out.
===
Imagination is more important than knowledge. —u know who
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
I thought this story was very helpful with links to the "evidence" that an Edgy upgrade is potentially dangerous, so I posted it to digg.com at http://digg.com/linux_unix/Slashdot_Upgrading_to_U buntu_Edgy_Eft_a_Nightmare
Exploded both times I tried it. GNOME stopped booting, and a remove/reinstall broke KDE.
I ended up going and installing Kubuntu on my machine; it was less hassle.
Edgy's gotten a lot better lately though...I'm happy my Dell's hardbuttons actually work.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I ran the package manager with the -c switch and it started doing its thing. It, of course, crashed midway through installing packages, and it was something I had never seen before: apt complained that it could not go on because there was a broken symlink in a directory I had never heard of nor have ever been in (it was such an obscure directory that I can't even remember what it was). This package manager program, of course, couldn't handle this.
So after I deleted the missing symlink, I just did an apt-get dist-upgrade manually. It actually worked pretty well. I've only been using edgy for 48 hours so I don't know if anything is broken or not.
Still, I regret that it had to be that difficult, and i'm certain that a novice user wouldn't know how to fix that symlink problem.