Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare"

Theovon writes, "It's only been two days since the announcement of the official release of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and the fallout has been very interesting to watch. By and large, fresh installs of Edgy tend to go well. Many people report improved performance over Dapper, improved stability, better device support, etc. A good showing. But what I find really interesting is the debacle that it has been for people who wanted to do an 'upgrade' from Dapper (6.06). Installing OS upgrades has historically been fraught with problems, but previous Ubuntu releases, many other Linux distros, and MacOS X have done surprisingly well in the recent past. But not Edgy." Read on for the rest of Theovon's detailed report.

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!).

Comments

No probs for me.

[c0l0]

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.

Can't say I was too impressed with the upgrade

[also-rr]

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 :)

Worked for me

[DrXym]

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.

Re:use gentoo and never do another dist upgrade ag

[livingdeadline]

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.

dist-upgrade problems

[JRiddell]

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.

Re:interesting

[vhogemann]

Well,

There is this little file called /etc/iftab that handles this kind of issue:

victor@vertigo:~$ cat /etc/iftab
# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces.
# See iftab(5) for syntax.
 
ath0 mac XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX arp 1
eth0 mac XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX arp 1

;-)