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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!).
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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...
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This is a symptom of a long-standing misunderstanding about shell scripting.
If you have #!/bin/sh you should be using POSIX shell, which will execute fine in bash, dash or the old sh. People run into problems because they've put #!/bin/sh and then used bash-only syntax - ie they should already have used #!/bin/bash, but didn't because they didn't read any docs and don't know better.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
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.
So what you're saying is "I installed some important drivers through an unsupported tool that works in a stupid way so that it can be called 'easy', and then when the official tool failed to upgrade this manually-installed software of which it was unaware, causing problems, I was pissed" ?
Just exactly what part of "unsupported" did you not understand? This is not analogous to a XP Service Pack
installation breaking things as you put it. It's analogous to a service pack breaking all the registry
hacks you've done to make Home act like Professional and not report back home. What you did was unsupported
and it doesn't matter whether it's Windows, MacOS, Linux, or any other OS you choose to name. Unsupported means
precisely that- and if it breaks on you you get both pieces.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sorry, but if you assumed that /bin/sh was guaranteed to be bash, you only have yourself to blame.
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
This has been an issue I've seen all over the Ubuntu boards. A lot of people were playing around for months with the Xgl/Compiz/Beryl stuff. ALL of which is Alpha code! Then they updated the underlying OS and X broke, they then scream that Edgy broke X. No, your Alpha quality Beryl broke the updated X you just installed.
For me, I removed all the Firefox 1.5.x themes and extentions I had installed (noting the names in case I could find updates later). I uninstalled the Xgl/Compiz stuff I put in place a couple months back, and returned to a vanilla Gnome desktop. Then I updated and had absolutely no issues at all. I haven't taken the time to chase down the Xgl/Beryl updates to get that working manually again, and the Firefox theme I was using isn't updated for 2.0 yet, but I'm still fine with the standard desktop and all of the other apps/hardware I have.
It stopped amazing me how many people scream about an OS update breaking things when they've gone so far outside the box. With OS X, the consistent source of breakage is the "Haxie" crap that injects code snippits into core applications to make them look/behave differently. They leave all that crap installed and active, then upgrade to the latest feline... then are surprised when those "Haxies" break everything. I guess I am still amazed that they're surprised every time.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
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"
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.
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