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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 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!
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
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
Upgrading from Kubuntu dapper using s/dapper/edgy/g
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.
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.
The problems will all be fixed on Patch Tuesday.
Summation 2
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.
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 have a simple HOWTO for your problem, http://counting.xf.cz/id2964.html
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);
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
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?
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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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.
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" ?
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 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.
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.
Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. And I'm serious. Frankly, I don't care that I did something in an unsupported method (ie installing a bloody graphics driver). All I wanted was to upgrade Ubuntu from a version released 4 months ago to the current version. If Windows died every time a service pack was applied, you would probably be laughing your arses off at Microsoft.
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
I can affirm this. Last night I spent a few hours wondering what went wrong with the Dapper to Edgy upgrade. They both had to do with some peculiarity of my system:
GUI upgrade failed halfway because xorg-common complained that /usr/X11R6/bin is not empty. Edgy now installs all X programs under /usr/bin, so /usr/X11R6/bin needs to become symbolic linked to /usr/bin. It turned out that I installed a snapshot of DRI drivers for my Mach 64 video card, which left a file /usr/X11R6/bin/xdriinfo, and dpkg tried to preserve that for me.
Fix: run
until all packages are upgraded properly.As a result of the previous boo-boo, X drivers weren't automatically upgraded. The packages were renamed from xserver-xorg-driver-* to xserver-xorg-video-*, and for some reason apt-get didn't pick up these new names. So I wasn't able to start X after the next reboot.
Fix: run apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-all
A final problem had to do with usplash not being able to find a theme, so I watched in horror as Ubuntu booted in text mode. I switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, but I upgraded the system back to Ubuntu. As a result, the usplash theme "update-alternatives" symbolic link pointed to a non-existent Kubuntu theme after the upgrade.
Fix: run
and after that, run to reflect the change in initrd for booting.All of these commands to run must be performed as root, and I recommend switching to a single user mode before you do that.
I once had a signature.
Your text config files are still there (in /etc for example) with Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't 'force' you to use the gui.
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
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.
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
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!!!
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
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
I agree with careful partitioning, but I do it in a fairly crass way... I just have one partition for "/home" (ext3), one for swap, and then a bunch of partitions for "/" of each each distro/release I want to install. I always do fresh installs to a new partition - never upgrades.
/home after a new release, which is tolerable as long as you don't do it too frequently. In the meantime the older version remains 100% unmodified (untouched by the new install) and you can continue to use it until your post-install updates are complete. I try to upgrade as infrequently as possible - I don't upgrade just because there's a new version, but because there's some extremely compelling reason to do so.
This approach is a compromise - your old and new installs are guaranteed to work (as much as any new install is!) since there's no sharing of any system files, but you do then have to reinstall anything outside of
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.
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.
Firefox 2.0 had only been officially released for a couple of days before Ubuntu shipped with it. That's not just fast, it's bleeding-edge. (Actually, this is more bleeding-edge than Gentoo unstable, which is still 1.5.0.7, possibly partly because Gentoo has to fix the build system again...)
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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