Use apt-p2p To Improve Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade

An anonymous reader writes "With Jaunty Jackalope scheduled for release in 12 days on April 23, this blog posting describes how to switch to apt-p2p in preparation for the upgrade. This should help significantly to reduce the load on the mirrors, smooth out the upgrade experience for all involved, and bypass the numerous problems that have occurred in the past on Ubuntu release day. Remember to disable all third-party repositories beforehand."

Comments

Website and Warning

[Daengbo]

The site doesn't have much information, but other sources I have read state that apt-p2p is very experimental. Use at your own peril!

Re:Website and Warning

[drinkypoo]

The site looks badly outdated. The caveat I would add to your warnings is that the upload speed is uncapped by default. You'll want to limit this unless you want the world to be able to leech you hard. If I left this unlimited my ISP would fucking kill me.

Re:Website and Warning

[smallfries]

How do they handle security? If I let the world leech from me then I can seed whatever kind of files that I want through the swarm. Please tell me there is something a bit more secure than a broken (md5) or a nearly broken (sha1) hash stopping this...

Re:Website and Warning

[drinkypoo]

Easily found from apt-p2p's main page: protocol... please don't ask me to browse the web for you again, kthxbye.

Re:Website and Warning

[strstrep]

I don't know about Ubuntu, but Debian uses GPG to sign all their packages, so I'd guess that Ubuntu does the same.

Re:Website and Warning

[smallfries]

I didn't ask you to browse the web for me. In a discussion in which you've already posted four or five messages I assumed that you knew something about apt-p2p. Perhaps you didn't understand, but I was asking you *if* you knew how the security on that worked. Blithely doing a search and presenting useless information isn't helpful, which is why I didn't do that myself.

FYI the answer isn't on the page that you found, but it is something that would require either a more detailed search *or* background information. My mistake, I assumed that you knew what you were talking about.

Re:Website and Warning

[mail2345]

On their protocol page, if you scroll down a bit, it says it uses SHA1.

Re:Website and Warning

[smallfries]

Yeah I saw that on the link that drinkypoo provided. That isn't really a whole answer though, as sha1 should be broken fairly soon. The other reply from strstrep seems more informative, even though he says that he's just guessing. A higher level signature on each package would provide much better security.

Re:Website and Warning

[mrsteveman1]

If we're talking about package security, there is already signing of the packages themselves.

Getting them from a different source shouldn't matter as long as the signing method is secure, and i believe with deb it is GPG so, yea.

Re:Website and Warning

[blueg3]

You do realize that there are no extant MD5 or SHA1 attacks that can produce data of a specified length that matches a specified hash, right? (For that matter, there isn't such an attack when the length isn't specified.) You would need such an attack to poison something like BitTorrent with false data.

(This protocol, and BitTorrent, both use SHA1.)

The existence of a type of attack on MD5 doesn't even imply that MD5 is rendered useless, much less SHA1. There's only a risk where that type of attack can be employed.

Re:Website and Warning

[NFN_NLN]

Easily found from apt-p2p's main page: protocol... please don't ask me to browse the web for you again, kthxbye.

What are you a leprechaun? You're bound by ancient laws to comply with any mortal request, the only loophole being that you can bitch all you want :).

Just to be sure, can you please post your credit card number, name, address and CID.... oh and naked pictures of your leprechaun wife too and any daughters over the age of 250 (I'm not falling for pedochaun's trap again).

Re:Website and Warning

[smallfries]

Good point, I had of course forgotten that the blocks are constant size. That would require a much better attack than those currently available.

You are aware that there is an attack for MD5 when the length isn't specified though? There is a demo that will produce forged pdf documents with a given md5 hash.

Re:Website and Warning

[Haeleth]

You are aware that there is an attack for MD5 when the length isn't specified though? There is a demo that will produce forged pdf documents with a given md5 hash.

Where can I find this? It isn't showing up on Google, and Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about it.

The best attack on MD5 I can find is the well-known ability to generate two different documents with the same checksum. But that one doesn't allow you to choose what the checksum will be, so it's no use in this case: if you didn't create the legitimate package, you can't create a malicious one with the same MD5 unless you have a better attack.

Re:Website and Warning

[smallfries]

Damn. My memory is terrible today. Ignore me, I am talking absolute crap. The attack that I was thinking of is exactly the one that you describe. There isn't a pre-image attack against md5 yet, only a collision attack. My apologies, I've just made a significant dent in the signal-to-noise ratio around these parts.

Re:Website and Warning

[Mozk]

In any case, even if somebody could produce a file that matched the checksum, you would have to download the entire file from that one source, as any discrepancies in the data would produce an incorrect checksum. Typically with p2p (though I'm not sure of apt-p2p's particular method), you are downloading from multiple sources, and it's unlikely that they would all have that file unless they themselves were downloading it only from that one source.

Re:Website and Warning

[LittleBigScript]

I read your comment as "Use at your own perl!"

Re:Website and Warning

[Anonymous Coward]

when you click on the link how to switch to apt-p2p in the article you get:

http://box4.mercumaya.net/suspended.page/

This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.

Somebody forgot to pay a bill!

Re:Website and Warning

[Nevyn]

Last I checked dpkg didn't sign packages (like rpm), and thus. apt didn't check those signatures. The repodata is signed though, which should still be secure using apt-p2p ... AIUI.

Re:Website and Warning

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian & Ubuntu have both been signing all their packages for quite a few years, this page would make it look like Debian has since at least '02 ... I remember that the packages were signed for a while before checking the signatures was made default, not sure of timeframe though.

Re:Website and Warning

[TheCRAIGGERS]

True, but you also have chunk sizes to think about. Most p2p files are much, much larger than the typical apt package, which is why you'll usually download in 1 meg chunks or so from multiple clients. When you're only downloading 300k, it wouldn't be worth it to chunk it up (your download would likely go slower, not faster) so I would imagine you would download from only one source.

Just in case it isn't obvious, I don't know how apt-p2p implements this either.

Re:Website and Warning

[drinkypoo]

Can't find a cite but I think you can make files with the proper hash, again if you don't care about size. But finding a second file with the proper hash which will also pass a signature test? Good fucking luck. The only purpose of the file hash is to prevent you from wasting time downloading the wrong file. The signature system will prevent you from actually trying to unpack the wrong file, if somehow someone should slip you the wrong file via apt-p2p.

Alternate CD

[elwin_windleaf]

You can also upgrade Ubuntu with an alternate install CD. These can be downloaded via bittorrent, and usually trigger an "automatic update" prompt as soon as they are inserted into an existing Ubuntu system.

Re:Alternate CD

[drinkypoo]

That will help a lot, but you're still going to have a lot to get from the mirrors on a typical system. Odds are, many of the packages in the ISO will be outdated by the time you get it :P I'm running apt-get update on my apt-p2p'd system and so far, so good.

Re:Alternate CD

[QuantumRiff]

No, as he stated, you can get the alternate disc from bittorrent as well. Then use that to upgrade to 9.04. That would DRASTICALLY reduce the load on the mirrors..

Re:Alternate CD

[jedidiah]

...some people even package up the other repositories as buyware DVDs these days.
So you could buy/torrent pretty much the whole ball of wax if you wanted to.

Re:Alternate CD

[drinkypoo]

The person who modded you up obviously misunderstood my comment and/or the situation vis-a-vis updating your system in the same way you did: every package on your system is unlikely to be represented on the alternate install CD, and even some of those which are will be outdated by the time you get the ISO, so you will still be downloading numerous packages from the repositories. I didn't say it wouldn't help. You either didn't read my comment, didn't understand my comment, or don't understand the relationship between the repo on the CD and the live repo.

Re:Alternate CD

[Yfrwlf]

And I thought you could put in any CD, not just the alternate CD, that had updated packages on it, and could use it as a repository. In other words, I'm pretty sure putting in a normal desktop CD will make it prompt for if you want to update your packages off of it, and in the case of desktops, the desktop CD should be what you should use, as it would probably have more appropriate packages than the alternate CD may have.

Re:Alternate CD

[Anonymous Coward]

no, this is wrong. You can only use the Alternate cd. The desktop or live cd has only a small handful of actual packages. Most of the space is taken up by an image of an all ready installed system (extension .squashfs I believe). The alternate cd, on the other hand, is almost entirely packages, with the addition of a program that can do the upgrade.

Re:Alternate CD

[MichaelSmith]

And I thought you could put in any CD, not just the alternate CD, that had updated packages on it, and could use it as a repository. In other words, I'm pretty sure putting in a normal desktop CD will make it prompt for if you want to update your packages off of it, and in the case of desktops, the desktop CD should be what you should use, as it would probably have more appropriate packages than the alternate CD may have.

This worked years ago. I believe they stopped it because of space limitations on the disk.

Re:Alternate CD

[williamgrant]

The desktop CD has never contained the actual package files, so it has never been possible to upgrade from it.

Re:Alternate CD

[MichaelSmith]

Back before they had a graphical installer the normal ubuntu CD would upgrade like that. I don't think it was called the Alternate disk then, but it did behave a lot like the current Alternate disk.

Re:Alternate CD

[rts008]

I think that was when the Alt disk was labeled install, and the other was live.

Re:Alternate CD

[supernova_hq]

Yes, I actually have a set of those (6.02 or something). It comes in a cardboard 2-pack. One is "install", the other "live".

Re:Alternate CD

[Yfrwlf]

I see, thanks for the info. :)

Re:Alternate CD

[drinkypoo]

And I thought you could put in any CD, not just the alternate CD, that had updated packages on it, and could use it as a repository.

Others have addressed your other points so I will only address this one.

If another CD (not the Desktop CD, as has been covered) has the deb files on it, you can come up with some way to use it as a repo. Barring the ability to do that you can just copy them to /var/cache/apt/archives (IIRC) and then run the update and it will use the packages from the cache. The issue here is that if you install just a couple random packages from the online repo you can easily get tons of packages which aren't on ANY Ubuntu ISO. You could MAKE your own CD with all the packages to do the update in a directory, and then use apt-ftparchive to make Contents and Release files in that directory, and now you have a repository. Mount it someplace and refer to it in your sources.list and you can use the packages.

If you want a list of the packages you will need you can use apt-get -qq -y --print-uris package | cut -d' ' -f1 to get a list of all the files you need to download; pass this to xargs wget -c -nc to fetch them all. Or use sed instead of the 'cut' to prepend 'wget' to each line, and redirect it into a file called download.bat, drop wget.exe into the same folder as the script, and you can just stick it into a Windows PC someplace and double-click the script to download everything.

Re:Alternate CD

[Yfrwlf]

Thanks for the info, but I'm honestly a lot more concerned with archiving and using Linux packages which, you know, actually stay relevant for a long time, i.e. that are universal, work on any distro, etc. Those are the only ones worth sharing and promoting. Proprietary packaging systems can go to hell.

good idea but...

[mrphoton]

I had wondered for a while why yum and apt did not do this by default. It would seem a great ideal. However.... I recently tried to down load fedora 11 alpha via bit torrent using a BT internet connection in the UK. It worked great for about 10Mb (@90-100kb/s), then the download speed gradually ground to a halt. (5kb/s) When I tried a direct download of the same iso the speed bumped back up to a steady 100kb/s. I concluded BT was throttling my bit torrent connection of a legal download to a very slow speed.
So my point is sounds like a great idea but if it is enabled by default it had better have some way to detect bandwidth throttling of p2p networks and revert to http transfer.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe you shouldn't give your money to an ISP that's a piece of shit.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's britain. BT/MI5 is the only option for a lot of them, think AT&T.

Re:good idea but...

[s0l1dsnak3123]

I use another ISP that buys their bandwidth from a wholesaler called entanet. They are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA, but they give massive bandwidth, and do not block any ports or filter p2p.

Re:good idea but...

[nurb432]

I had wondered for a while why yum and apt did not do this by default. *snip*

Because it would be wrong to default to forcing a person to share their limited resources.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA, but do not block any ports or filter p2p.

That does not compute!

Re:good idea but...

[Jurily]

They are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA, but they give massive bandwidth, and do not block any ports or filter p2p.

So, they're letting you do whatever you want, to make sure they maximize the amount of money they can sue you for?

Re:good idea but...

[FluffyWithTeeth]

This isn't how it works in the UK. If BT has phone lines going somewhere, then you have dozens of ISPs to choose from.

They can be buying direct from BT wholesale, or own anything quite a bit further up the chain. Noone should really be touching the BT consumer ISP for any reason.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if you're not using p2p to download copyrighted material, that might not be a problem.

Re:good idea but...

[Fruit]

It could be that your uploading is killing your download speed. See one of the other comments for instructions on how to limit upload speed if you hadn't already.

Re:good idea but...

[Teun]

I assume you reported this issue with BT and what was their response?

Re:good idea but...

[INT_QRK]

Please correct my understanding if it I don't seem to be getting it, but I'm more than a little uncomfortable about downloading from anywhere except an official repository wherein I have certificates to verify the identity of the source. I trust Canonical. Call me paranoid, but I just don't trust an anonymous man-in-the middle from a Peer-to-peer scheme they this seems to suggest.

Re:good idea but...

[Jurily]

Of course, if you're not using p2p to download copyrighted material, that might not be a problem.

And to all of us who are not copyright lawyers, encryption is easier. BTW even Linux is copyrighted.

Re:good idea but...

[Hurricane78]

The beginning flood was the BT program searching for sources and announcing itself to the network.

If you would have kept it running, it would have gone up again. Or there were not as much high-bandwidth users, so compete with the direct download server.

At least, that is my experience with P2P programs.

Re:good idea but...

[s0l1dsnak3123]

says anonymous coward - the most notorious pirate on the internets!

Re:good idea but...

[mrphoton]

When using bit torrent to download linux and my line has not been throttled. I usually download the image via bit torrent, then go to the fedora site and get hold of the check sum directly. Then check.... I am paranoid too.

Re:good idea but...

[turbidostato]

Please undo moderation to parent post. Signed packages anyone?

Re:good idea but...

[vadim_t]

Ubuntu packages are signed. The signature certifies that the package was mirrored as-is and not modified in any way.

Re:good idea but...

[Kjella]

All packages are signed, the repository is just a convienient way of getting them. If you add a third party repository they usually also ask you to add their public key to the trusted package signers. That's also why you have all the local mirrors - I doubt Canonical operates very many of them. Same thing in companies, set one machine to download and the 100 others to download from the local machine, you don't need to put any trust in that machine as it's just passing signed packages. So you download the package from P2P or whatever, apt checks the signature and if's Genuine Canonical(tm) it'll install the package otherwise it'll complain. Didn't you notice the repositories are all http? No certificates or security checks there, anyone can give you any garbage data but it won't have the right signature.

Re:good idea but...

[harry666t]

As long as the signature is OK, then you can get it from wherever you want, even evilhackers.org or microsoft.com. If you trust the key, you can trust the package.

Now, do you trust the key that you downloaded (along with the iso) through plain http?

Re:good idea but...

[shentino]

You shouldn't be using BT unless you have an alternative.

If you can switch, consider doing so and let market forces punish BT.

If BT is entrenched, then I pity you, and encourage you to use evasive maneuvers, preferably without breaking TOS.

Either way, you may wish to make it a political issue and complain loudly to whatever you britons have for our yankee FTC or FCC. I'd guess "ministry of communication" but I'm just a yankee.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I concluded BT was throttling my bit torrent connection of a legal download to a very slow speed.

I had the same experience here, and came to the same conclusion. Throttling by more than 95% seemed norm rather than exception anytime I wanted to run an update. So I dropped BT like a hot potato as my ISP and switched provider. After the obligatory problems getting re-connected (aren't there any providers competent enough to do the job right the first time around?) things are running smoothly now. I highly recommend voting with your wallet if you're not satisfied with your current service.

Re:good idea but...

[RalphSleigh]

As far as I can tell, British Telecom's retail ISP (BT) throttle Bittorrent (BT) to around 10 kb/sec down during peak times, but leaving torrents on overnight works well, as they unthrottle around midnight, and I can usually max out my 8Mb/sec ADSL with bittorrent overnight. This is the only limitation I have come across so am pretty happy with them as an ISP.

Re:good idea but...

[WarwickRyan]

That'll be BT's 'traffic management'.

They're also spying on your surfing habits to sell advertising (google Phorm for more details).

Oh, and you pay a premium for the service compared to other ISPs.

Glad I left England, my ISP in Netherlands costs 45 EUR / month for 8mbit down (plus phone service), and you actually get that 90% of the time.

Re:good idea but...

[blueg3]

Encryption doesn't really do you any good in the legal department. It only makes it more difficult for your ISP to identifyg BitTorrent connections.

Re:good idea but...

[smoker2]

Find alternate nameservers. I use my (ex UK)colo server as nameservers instead of the BT default and I get much better service.
Keep access to the tracker. Besides which, it's easier to dload over http from an Irish server. Always quick, actually better than Finland these days. I get bittorrent speeds of over 400 KBps with a 26 KBps upload limit on an "Up to 8MB" line, which is actually connected at around 6 MB. But only at night.

Re:good idea but...

[Jurily]

Encryption doesn't really do you any good in the legal department. It only makes it more difficult for your ISP to identifyg BitTorrent connections.

How are they going to convict me if there are no identifiable law-breaking files on my hard drive? I hope my right to not testify against myself is still stronger than a copyright claim.

Re:good idea but...

[MichaelSmith]

That's also why you have all the local mirrors - I doubt Canonical operates very many of them. Same thing in companies, set one machine to download and the 100 others to download from the local machine, you don't need to put any trust in that machine as it's just passing signed packages.

While we are on the subject, is anybody else having trouble with files missing from the Australian mirror? I am running jaunty on my eeepc and I have had to point it to the main server to be able to update it at all.

Locally I have squid running with a big cache on my LAN so when upgrade day comes I should only be downloading each file once.

Re:good idea but...

[blueg3]

I thought we were talking about p2p here, or at least some transfer of data over a network.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran into this problem from time in Hoary and I used the Australian Ubuntu mirrors. It didn't happen often, but it did happen often enough to grab my attention.

Re:good idea but...

[Wizarth]

I have had problems, often there are files missing that show up the next day. I'm using Netspace's mirror, which mirrors the au mirror I think (which is Optus hosted).

Oh, and apt-cacher-ng is good for caching apt packages. You point your LAN machines at the machine with apt-cacher-ng running, and it does the fetching and caches locally. This is particularly useful because you can point apt-cacher-ng at different sources (or multiple, but I'm not sure how that works) and the LAN machines just see the packages as now being available, without having to point each machine at the other mirror.

Re:good idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, Clueless

Re:good idea but...

[supernova_hq]

I don't know about *missing* packages, but I've noticed the Canadian server is dog slow. I get about a 10x speed increase by switching to the Main server. First thing I do when installing ubuntu on a friends machine is switch it to the Main server.

Re:good idea but...

[supernova_hq]

I know the packages/iso's are downloaded through http, but aren't the pgp keys downloaded through https?

Re:good idea but...

[mikechant]

At least with Virgin Media, they claim not to (and in my experience don't) throttle on a protocol basis. They throttle everything during peak hours once you've downloaded a certain amount, but not aggressively (i.e. the 'throttled' speed is still quite usable). If you're going to have any limits at all, the Virgin service seems to be one of the least offensive of the large ISPs.

Re:good idea but...

[ant_tmwx]

try a metalink download from Fedora using aria2. it can use torrents but also mirrors.

Slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

mirror here: http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:3gY3Bq4EKnMJ:blog.chenhow.net/os/linux/ubuntu/using-apt-p2p-for-faster-upgrades-from-intrepid-to-jaunty/+http://blog.chenhow.net/os/linux/ubuntu/using-apt-p2p-for-faster-upgrades-from-intrepid-to-jaunty&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl

Deterrent

[senorpoco]

I have yet to have an Ubuntu distro update smoothly, ever. But that won't stop me, onward I will plunge headlong into it with abandon. I don't like my data anyway.

Re:Deterrent

[blackest_k]

To be honest me neither, there is always something not quite right, with a brand new distro, Intrepid broke sound for a number of people. Was it Hardy with the evolution bug that maxed out the CPU. I think it's always going to be that way but its usually fixed within a month at most. Die hard Ubuntu users hold up their hands in horror and say things like thats it I'm moving back to Windows but it's all good fun and we all get busy fixing the problems and finding cures and occasionally reverting back to the now stable version we have become used to.

The best advice I can give for anyone new to Linux is don't go for a distro which has been out less than a month, there will be wrinkles that need ironing out in the new version and without some experience its going to be more frustrating than fun.

Re:Deterrent

[Yfrwlf]

OK, that's weird, I *never* have had a problem, I'm using Jaunty 9.04 which I've upgraded all the way from 7.04. Just have never had a reason to completely do a fresh install.

Re:Deterrent

[Abcd1234]

You're not the only one. My T61 has gone from 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 -> 8.10 quite easily. Heck, that's one of the very reasons I use a Debian-based distro: I get upgrades that actually work.

Re:Deterrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it goes smoothly or not is probably mostly random, but in fact the update from 8.10 to the 9.04 beta was probably the first time so far I didn't have to tweak a single thing (except declining the automatic cleanup of "obsolete" packages and doing it myself afterwards) when dist-upgrading Ubuntu. (The previous one, from 8.04 to 8.10, was also close to that, but not quite as clean.)

Re:Deterrent

[Anonymous Coward]

I only had one bad dist-upgrade fail on me, and I've been dist-upgrading since Breezy (since 6.06 on about 5 different machines). That failure was with the whole libata-switchover (edgy->feisty?), which caused all my disks to be relabeled s/hd/sd/.

Even for that failure, the people who did a clean install of Edgy hadn't been bitten by it because edgy used UUIDs to designate the partitions; I hadn't, because a dist-upgrade doesn't touch /etc/fstab. I never checked the release notes, it might have been mentioned there. /off-topic

Re:Deterrent

[Noxn]

Hehe, i know these "Obsolete" packages thing too. When i upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10, it told me that every package, even gnome, was obsolete and about to get removed. I should read what i am approving. That killed my system (When i booted i got a command line, which still was enough to backup my data.)

Re:Deterrent

[supernova_hq]

I tend to do a full reinstall, not for stability issues, but because it works as a kind of "cleaner".

So far wiping / is the only way I've found to kill that f*cking origami (FAH) service!

Re:Deterrent

[supernova_hq]

If you had command line, why did you just reinstall the packages...?

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

should get *most* of them back.

Re:Deterrent

[joib]

Interesting. My Ubuntu 8.10 installation at home started its life as a debian installation sometime back in 1997. Since then it's just been dist-upgraded [*], and of course moved to new computers every now and then. I've never had any major problems with upgrading.

[*] Yes, for some of the early ubuntu releases it was possible to dist-upgrade from debian.

Re:Deterrent

[pxc]

Haha. It hasn't been that bad in my experience, actually. I'm currently running Jaunty beta, and this has been the same install since 7.10.

Re:Deterrent

[TheQuantumShift]

Weird, that's the exact opposite of my experience. Ubuntu has been the only distro I have used that actually did updates and upgrades with zero breakage. It's what makes me stick with it, everything just works. But as always, YMMV...

Re:Deterrent

[Yfrwlf]

Jaunty comes with this new "Computer Janitor" program in the Admin section. I wonder if it will clean up some or most of those stragglers you speak of.

Re:Deterrent

[supernova_hq]

From what I've seen, it only removes/installs the basic application list using synaptic/apt-get. I have removed/purged origami 3 times. I even manually removed it from the startup list and it STILL started on every freaking bootup!

Oh well, I've reinstalled since then and do my FAH on my PS3 now anyways

Re:Deterrent

[Yfrwlf]

Well, GNU/Linux package management and the GNU/Linux core systems/APIs/etc still suck, what can I say.

I'm upgrading to 8.10

[a09bdb811a]

Currently on 8.04, I'll be upgrading to 8.10 sometime after 9.04 is released.

Staying 6 months behind is a reasonable compromise. Let the lab rats (er, enthusiasts!) debug the new stuff first. Last time I checked 8.10 in a VM there was something like 320MB worth of updated packages.

As for the packages themselves, run a local apt proxy like approx, especially if you have more than one Debian or Ubuntu system. It keeps a copy of every .deb you download, and automatically purges the ones that are outdated.

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[drinkypoo]

My advice if you like the stable releases is to skip the .10 releases altogether. I always like to chase the bleeding edge, although that is kind of a dangerous place to be. My most salient advice is to make a bootable, external-disk full system backup before attempting an Ubuntu upgrade. It's pretty easy once you figure out grub.

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[badpazzword]

Agreed. 9.04 (Beta) feels way stabler than 8.10 (Beta), just like 8.04 (Beta) felt way stabler than 7.10 (Beta).

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[SanityInAnarchy]

My most salient advice is to make a bootable, external-disk full system backup before attempting an Ubuntu upgrade.

I'm far too lazy for that, so I tend to just back everything up to a folder -- even a folder on the same system. It's much easier to downgrade if the entire thing falls apart, but I've never had an Ubuntu upgrade completely kill my filesystem or hard drive.

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[drinkypoo]

I've never had an Ubuntu upgrade completely kill my filesystem or hard drive.

"I know what you're asking yourself..."

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Agreed. 9.04 (Beta) feels way stabler than 8.10 (Beta)...

Hmm, for me 8.10 runs just fine. 9.04 can't keep X up long enough for me to debug so I had to roll it back.

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[SanityInAnarchy]

Given that I've also never once had a kernel upgrade or OS upgrade of any kind completely trash my filesystem, or hard drive, or controller, etc.

Having a backup of my data and configuration is useful. Backing up several gigs of software really isn't -- worst case, I lose a few hours re-downloading it.

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[MichaelSmith]

As for the packages themselves, run a local apt proxy like approx, especially if you have more than one Debian or Ubuntu system. It keeps a copy of every .deb you download, and automatically purges the ones that are outdated.

How is that different from running a normal http proxy?

Re:I'm upgrading to 8.10

[Anonymous Coward]

You were about right for 8.10. When I used it it had long-standing printing bugs on at least AMD64 and PowerPC (I had problems on both at any rate), they are fixed now. But it did take months. (No problem in 8.04 on the same systems.)

          9.04 seems nice in a VM, the alpha was buggy originally but it's been good for months actually. But I have not tried it on a real system to find out how it is "when the rubber hits the road."

Slower to start

[Nomaxxx]

I've used apt-p2p as an apt-get replacement for a short time. It often downloads faster than the standard method but is slower to start downloading. So it's not great when you have many small packages to install. But for a full system upgrade I guess it's a good alternative. Especially on (or close to) launch date when you're sure that update manager will go idle midway through the upgrade. Other alternative is to wait for a week or too after release date when servers are less busy.

Re:Slower to start

[AvitarX]

What speeds to you normally get?

I ask because I pretty consistently get 1.4 MB/s from the mirrors (I ran the speed test and chose the quickest).

Obviously right around release things are different though.

Re:Slower to start

[Nomaxxx]

Wow 1.4 Mb/s!!! Unfortunately, I can only dream of such speed!!! I live in the country and my DSL is 1 Mbit/s. Best speed I can expect is 150 Kb/s. :-/

Re:Slower to start

[AvitarX]

Not to rub it in, but I get 2.5 often enough (The quickest I ever get from P2P is about 500 KB/s though.

And Comcast has decided to cap us, but it is a fairly reasonable 250 GB/month.

Good citizenship

[AlecC]

What I like about this is not so much the potentially faster upgrade as the ability to contribute a bit to others. The six-monthly upgrades are are rate enough that I don't mind if they are a bit slow - not that they have been. But I am very conscious that I am using other people's freely given bandwidth and I am pleased to be able to give some back.

Does anybody know if I can force my various machines to cross-peer from each other? If I update one first, I don't want the others searching the Net for peers - they should just copy from the first.

Re:Good citizenship

[Daengbo]

You should just set up an apt-cache on one and direct the others to fetch from the first. There are several to choose from. Search for "apt proxy."

Bandwidth usage

[Chris_Jefferson]

I'm concerned that after reading the article, and apt-p2p's FAQ page, that I can't find any guide to how much upload bandwidth this thing will use. While I'm all for sharing, I find it important to cap my upload speed so my connection performs well on other stuff I'm doing, and also stop uploading once I'm at 1:1 sharing or so. Some of us pay if we use too much bandwidth!

Re:Bandwidth usage

[Mr_Perl]

Can't help you with the paying for extra bandwidth, but the wondershaper has helped my limited speed home network remain responsive during downloads.

Re:Bandwidth usage

[nurb432]

It will obliterate your monthly use cap.

This mode of distribution only works in a perfect world, which few of us live in now.

Re:Bandwidth usage

[stevied]

Just installed it, there's an option in /etc/apt-p2p.conf to limit the upload bandwidth. I haven't tested it yet, however ..

Re:Bandwidth usage

[Midnight Thunder]

I'm concerned that after reading the article, and apt-p2p's FAQ page, that I can't find any guide to how much upload bandwidth this thing will use. While I'm all for sharing, I find it important to cap my upload speed so my connection performs well on other stuff I'm doing, and also stop uploading once I'm at 1:1 sharing or so. Some of us pay if we use too much bandwidth!

I hope that there is still an option to limit the downloads to mirrors, otherwise at company I work at I will probably be unable install/upgrade anything. This is because while they do tolerate a 1GB download, they don't tolerate P2P style behaviour.

Re:Bandwidth usage

[eldepeche]

The option is called "not using apt-p2p." I don't remember the exact syntax, but I think there's a switch in the file /etc/apt/this/is/the/default.behavior

Re:Bandwidth usage

[Nazlfrag]

Just keep using apt. There is no need to use this tool, it's voluntary. My ISP caps my uploads and downloads, but hosts an uncapped Ubuntu mirror so sorry to all the potential leechers but I'm sticking with traditional apt.

You could also explain that p2p is not inherently bad, just another protocol but it will probably fall on deaf ears.

Re:Bandwidth usage

[mkarcher]

The option is called "not using apt-p2p." I don't remember the exact syntax, but I think there's a switch in the file /etc/apt/this/is/the/default.behavior

Well, this certainly gets my nomination for New Meme of the Month.

No thanks, im no criminal

[wjh31]

p2p is a method used exclusively by criminals, there's no way im going to be using this method.

Re:No thanks, im no criminal

[Anonymous Coward]

ha ha.....

Slashdotted?

[drinkypoo]

It worked for me. But in case it really is slashdotted here's the story, from memory (let's test those theories eh?)

1. apt-get install apt-p2p (Not in Hardy and older repos IIRC... for you late/sporadic upgraders)
2. Back up your /etc/apt/sources.list and then edit the file, s/\/\//\/\/localhost:9977\// (hope I got that right -- Guess I could have just used # or something eh?)
3. Not in the guide: edit /etc/apt-p2p/apt-p2p.conf and set UPLOAD_LIMIT ... just in case. :) You probably have to /etc/init.d/apt-p2p restart after that.
4. apt-get update
5. Then make the update... But it's not time for that yet.

Re:Slashdotted?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Try this, based on your note. (I don't have an Ubuntu system in hand). rsync -avH /etc/apt/ /etc/apt.orig/ --delete # Makes sure you have an up-to-date copy apt-get install apt-p2p # or use synaptic for a GUI interface sed -i 's%//%/localhost:9977/%g' /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update

Re:Slashdotted?

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm sorry, I should not have accidentally used HTML format:

        rsync -avH /etc/apt/ /etc/apt.orig/ --delete # Makes sure you have an up-to-date copy
        apt-get install apt-p2p # or use synaptic for a GUI interface
        sed -i 's%//%/localhost:9977/%g' /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update

Re:Slashdotted?

[drinkypoo]

You still got the apt-get update on the wrong line, and dropped a / from your regexp. But also we both forgot to update files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d. With your help:
for i in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list
do
sudo sed -i 's%//%//localhost:9977/%g' "$i"
done
And of course, tweak *.list as appropriate. My directory had *.list and *.list.save files... I removed the latter :)

Re:Slashdotted?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Thank you: I didn't have an Ubuntu in hand, but was amused by the attempts to backspace-manage the '/' in the original command, and the handwaving for the "sed with this". The 'sed -i' command is one of the more useful feature additions to sed of the last 20 years.

Re:Slashdotted?

[drinkypoo]

I am too lazy to remember a flag I don't use nonstop. I rarely do global s&r in-place, so it's low on the list. Maybe this will be the time, though :)

More Linux mirrors needed

[Antique Geekmeister]

Many primary Linux download sites wind up taking an unreasonable amount of traffic from default setups. If you want to contribute back to the OS's and packages that you find so useful, consider setting up a local mirror to share with the world at large. If you can't justify that, at least consider setting up an internal rsync mirror anytime you have a dozen or more boxes to make updates and downloads much faster for your site, and configure your local machines to point to that local mirror.

This turns out to be especially useful for PXE installaters and cluster setups, for any Linux or other OS. There's nothing like having 100 internal Linux machines all trying to update OpenOffice at the same time from an external primary site, through a corporate DSL line, to ensure that many of the updates will fail.

Re:More Linux mirrors needed

[Warlord88]

Correct. Here at IIT Bombay, we have a local mirror of all repositories of major linux distributions. Saves a lot of bandwidth as well as time. All packages get downloaded very fast ~ 5 Mbps. I guess most of US universities must also have a local mirror.

Re:More Linux mirrors needed

[scientus]

just install apt-cacher-ng, WAY easier than a local repository, and doesnt waste bandwidth on stuff you never install.

Re:More Linux mirrors needed

[Antique Geekmeister]

Except when you have to reinstall machines, do a network wide upgrade, or have 100 machines updating openoffice or kernels on the same night.

Re:More Linux mirrors needed

[scientus]

its reasonable, but yes you should have one computer set to upgrade and hour before the rest, and large deployments could use a local mirror. Its smart unlike a regular proxy server.

Re:More Linux mirrors needed

[smoker2]

I already mirror a linux distro. If anybody needs space/bandwidth, you should know how to reach me.

Re:More Linux mirrors needed

[Anonymous Coward]

For an internal mirror for Debian based system, apt-cache is a better option. It caches a copy of any downloaded *.deb, so you don't need to download an entire repository.

Why upgrade?

[wiresquire]

If it works, why upgrade at all?

Ubuntu 8.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. It will have any security patches until the next LTS release, which is typically every 18 months. So, why not just wait for 9.10?

ws

Re:Why upgrade?

[Warlord88]

Firstly, there is an urge among many, many individual users to have the 'latest' stuff on their machines. Secondly, many would like to try out the new things in the latest distribution. Some things can be quite helpful. Ubuntu has always added small but useful things in each distribution. Servers is totally different case. But shouldn't servers be running debian anways?

Re:Why upgrade?

[Aladrin]

For the same reason that you'll upgrade to 9.10 instead of waiting for 11.04: Features.

Sure, it'll have all the bugfixes for years, but it won't have any of the new features.

(In case anyone has forgotten, LTS are supported for 3 years on the desktop, so there's no 'need' to upgrade every 18 months.)

Re:Why upgrade?

[rrossman2]

True, but... how in the world would I then run into the issue of having to try to patch the new kernel with a wireless injection module developed for a kernel that's quite a few revisions back?!
That would just be too easy!

Re:Why upgrade?

[WormholeFiend]

AFAIK, women prefer men who have all the latest upgrades

Re:Why upgrade?

[AusIV]

Some people prefer more recent software. On my laptop, I'm looking forward to OpenOffice 3.0, some upgrades to Tomboy, Pidgin, (tentatively) Amarok, and several other packages I use. The Open Source world moves quickly with most software, and running something that's close to two years old may mean you're missing a lot of features.

Certainly, there are systems you'd rather keep up and running in a known-good configuration than try new software that may or may not work as well. I have a MythTV backend / web and file server that I try to keep up as much as possible. It was on Dapper from the day it came out until I rebuilt the box and decided that since Gutsy and Dapper had about the same end-of-life, I'd use the more recent of the two. It stayed on Gutsy for about 14 months before being upgraded to Hardy, where it will stay until Hardy's support winds down.

I understand why you'd want to stay with one release for a long time, but the non-LTS releases exist for a reason, and it makes sense that people would want things like apt-p2p to help the upgrade go smoothly.

Re:Why upgrade?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Mostly because I'm already on 8.10, and I don't like being a full year out of date.

Some of that is actually legitimate -- for instance, various development tools and games would be falling out of date. Some of it's just impulsive -- I occasionally regret updating to 8.10, as KDE4 was really not ready.

Re:Why upgrade?

[windsurfer619]

If you have 8.10, you cannot upgrade to 9.10 directly. You must upgrade to 9.04 first. That's why you cannot simply wait for 9.10.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

I occasionally regret updating to 8.10, as KDE4 was really not ready.

Well, KDE4 in 0904beta is still not ready... Glad I'm still on 0804. But I do want a new kernel and ext4fs :(

Anyone knows a good, uptodate, userfriendly and binary distro that still uses KDE3.5?

Re:Why upgrade?

[Excelsior]

Better boot performance, new notification system, OpenOffice 3, Firefox 3.1, ext4.

Besides those, it's been my experience that any new version of any Linux distro, and especially Ubuntu, that each new version supports hardware that previously didn't work, or took an act of a command-line-god to get working.

My policy is, I keep the LTS release on my server, and upgrade it when a new LTS comes out. However, on my desktops and laptops, I always upgrade to the latest release. If you look at the list of new features, usually none of them would I care about on a server. The only exception in 9.04 is the inclusion of ext4, but I am taking a wait-and-see until there is more consensus that it is trustworthy.

Re:Why upgrade?

[ultrabot]

Anyone knows a good, uptodate, userfriendly and binary distro that still uses KDE3.5?

Debian "Lenny". Though I think I'd recommend staying with 8.04 instead of going to Lenny, having tried both I'd say many things just work better on 8.04.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu 0804 is LTS yes, but not Kubuntu 0804....

Re:Why upgrade?

[Kenz0r]

Well, I can tell you from experience that men who run Debian don't get any action at all.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu versions are updated with bug fixes and security patches only. Applications are not updated from VersionExample 2.0 to VersionExample 3.0. Application versions are only updated with new Ubuntu versions. You upgrade the OS to upgrade your applications -- you upgrade to get more Features instead of just more Fixes.

Re:Why upgrade?

[jedidiah]

What "latest" stuff?

Don't be vague.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Warlord88]

All the stuff. Latest eye-candy, latest office, latest amarok, latest firefox, latest foo, latest bar. You can also upgrade the individual packages but then why not upgrade the entire OS too? As I mentioned, there are some small improvements each time. Some may be useful, some not. One of the guys I know upgraded his ubuntu system so that he could get the close buttons on each tab of his terminal which were not available then. But the point is that its the urge to have the latest stuff and try out things. May or may not be justified. Debian sid branch is there for a reason and even regular desktop users use it.

Re:Why upgrade?

[lems1]

I couldn't agree more. My time is worth a lot more these days.

Let the n00bs test the new releases ;-)

Re:Why upgrade?

[fyoder]

For the same reason that you'll upgrade to 9.10 instead of waiting for 11.04: Features.

Until KDE 4 is ready for prime time, I'm going to stick with 8.04 LTS.

Re:Why upgrade?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What "latest" stuff? Don't be vague.

9.04 includes Brasero nicely integrated for CD/DVD burning, parity for multiple monitor support, faster boot times, an XGrid clone, some added filesystems, and other miscellany.

It is also useful if you want to run some of the end user software still in development that is targeting upcoming Linux releases and is not as stable/usable on 8.04. Personally, I installed it in a VM to test out, but found it not yet stable for me. I'll try again in a bit.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, only n00bs want to read Office 2007 files.

Retro-linux is awesomeee!111

Re:Why upgrade?

[BikeHelmet]

I messed up the power management in my Ubuntu install. I'll be upgrading (well, wiping then upgrading) because I want it back.

Re:Why upgrade?

[thsths]

>Well, KDE4 in 0904beta is still not ready...

I agree that it is not where KDE3 is, but at least it is beginning to get usable. Ok, even KDE4.1 in 8.10 is usable, but only barely, while KDE4.2 in 9.04 is actually nice, although not mature yet. Let's hope that KDE4.3 is finally "ready".

Re:Why upgrade?

[Haeleth]

Only n00bs want to read them in an Office clone. Real hackers read Office 2007 files by pulling the XML out of the ZIP container and reading that. In emacs or vi.

(Cue Yorkshiremen with comments about TECO, cat, raw binary, and how their fathers used to beat them with an abacus.)

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can tell you from experience that men who run Windows get all the action with the same sex.

There, fixed it for you.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Open Source world moves quickly with most software, and running something that's close to two years old may mean you're missing a lot of features.

Yeah, this is the main inconvenience with the "release early, release often" philosophy. If you're not updating the less mature software pretty often, you're likely missing out on a lot of core features and bug fixes.

I sort of think this would be less of a problem if backport repositories were maintained more regularly and promptly, but I think the answer is really to just upgrade, even though it would be nice not to have to do that so often.

Re:Why upgrade?

[supernova_hq]

Maybe you can use it to play Duke Nukem Forever!

Re:Why upgrade?

[supernova_hq]

Amarok 1 or 2? Beware, Amarok1 has be REMOVED from jaunty due to KDE no longer developing it.

At first I was pretty upset, but Rhythmbox (remember that?) has actually all but caught up with amarok1.x I am very happy with Rhythmbox now.

Re:Why upgrade?

[supernova_hq]

I running the beta for jaunty right now and am planning a full reinstall when the full release comes out. Are they are advantages to sticking with ext3 over ext4. My / partition is the only one I'm seriously considering changing, my /home will most likely stay ext3 till at least 9.10.

I know there are utility (live defrag, etc) and marginal performance updates in ext4, but I'm mostly worried about stability.

Google only seems to bring up performance comparisons with very few sites even hinting at stability.

Re:Why upgrade?

[supernova_hq]

pfff, my father used to beat me with stones grouped in piles of 10 in the dirt!

Re:Why upgrade?

[Aladrin]

The OP said 'Ubuntu', not 'Kubuntu'.

And KDE4 may not be 'ready for prime time', but I already like it better than 3.5, so I'm perfectly happy with it. To be clear: I was monstrously disappointed with 4.0, and 4.1 was just acceptable. 4.2 is good enough for me to like the change.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Beat The Odds]

AFAIK, women prefer men who have all the latest upgrades

No, they prefer men with the longest features.

If you want to get the new release when it's hot

[badpazzword]

I honestly suggest to upgrade when the RC is out (1). That's one week before the actual release date, or in other words Thursday. FYI, when I upgraded to the Alpha 6 I had to download 1.3 GBs; torrenting as much is still going to take a lot of time.

The Release Candidate is typically identical to the "gold" release; also you will help Canonical in testing everything runs as good as it should. If you install apt-p2p (2) you'll even get the warm fuzzy feeling of being a seed for the new packages. :D

The upgrade process is identical -- the only difference is in starting it. Hit Alt-F2 and use "update-manager -d" then hit "Upgrade".

(1) Or hell, upgrade /right now/. I'm using the beta and it is rather stable and experience tells me the beta is always pretty near to what goes gold.
(2) I wouldn't use apt-p2p to upgrade to a dev version as you will find far less peers. However installing it afterwards should let you act as a seed for those packages.

Site slashdotted!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we need slashdot-p2p...

What about deltas?

[cheftw]

I honestly cannot understand why they don't just release deltas against the old packages. They don't really change greatly between releases and most people do keep a reasonable number of packages in the apt cache. I know it won't work in every single case but maybe only then should they fall back to the full download. Getting the whole thing every time seems hideously inefficient.

Please someone show me where I'm wrong (in a helpful way if you can manage, bonus points for analogies).

Re:What about deltas?

[drinkypoo]

I honestly cannot understand why they don't just release deltas against the old packages.

They're waiting for you to overhaul apt to support delta packages.

Well? Let's see some code!

Re:What about deltas?

[ThePhilips]

Delta packages make little sense in Debian universe: you'll never find two servers configured same way. Meaning that for the delta packages to be useful, double amount of packages has to be maintained. Actually more than double: one has to maintain the delta packages to migrate from several older versions. And for fresh installs and security updates, not only deltas but the packages themselves would also have to be available too.

As *buntus go, that might make sense. After all most people sit on a particular distro version, upgrading using the delta packages shouldn't be a problem.

In the end it all boils down to what is cheaper: bandwidth or overhead of managing the delta packages. Considering that Debian already has 30k+(?) packages and at least 3 repos of them, the overhead of managing deltas might be really high. And the bandwidth day after day is becoming cheaper and cheaper...

Re:What about deltas?

[Anonymous Coward]

debdelta already exists:

http://packages.debian.org/debdelta

It just isn't well integrated with apt:

http://bugs.debian.org/498778

Re:What about deltas?

[scientus]

they already have this, its called defdiff and i think there are some debian mirrors that host them. But it makes more sense to use the full thing, and then have a local caching server. diffs would be more bandwidth where there are multiple installs from differnt starting packages.

Re:What about deltas?

[stevied]

More promising is some sort of system built on zsync - there are some ideas here.

Re:What about deltas?

[cheftw]

$diff slashface-1.1.deb slashface-1.2.deb> slashface1.1-1.2.debdelta

Re:What about deltas?

[drinkypoo]

It does need to be tightly integrated into apt, so that any apt-based tool can gain the benefits and it will operate fairly transparently to the user. That's one major advantage of apt-p2p over any of the other wacky things you can do to enhance apt. Actually, if we had some kind of system for packaging packet mangling rules with packages we could make this completely transparent, I bet. Probably way more hassle than it's worth, though. Anybody know if you can use apt-p2p by setting a proxy instead of changing sources.list entries?

Re:What about deltas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about that exactly but I have about 600 computers inside this department and I have the 600 computers use apt-p2p to a "mirror" server (instead of localhost). The mirror server still does the localhost mangling and all that but the end users just have a "normal but different" url type of thing to play with instead.

8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[badpazzword]

During the 8.10 upgrade, at some point, the cpu frequency selector will get stuck on the "Ondemand" setting, which during an OS upgrade pretty much means "use all the speed the CPU can give".

On my computer, that meant having it shut off midway the upgrade as I raced to downclock it screaming at policy-tool getting in the way ("I AM &@%!ING ROOT WHAT DO YOU MEAN I AM NOT ALLOWED"). If you need downclocking too, be wary.

I didn't experience this on my 9.04 upgrade to Alpha 5.

</personal-experience></fair-warning>

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[Clarious]

I always keep my laptop plugged in whenever I update (actually I do that all the time) :)

And you can use the GNOME cpufreq applet to change the governor (just remember to reinstall it to have suid)

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[vadim_t]

ondemand actually happens to be the best governor.

In theory, "powersave", by keeping the CPU frequency at a minimum would save some power in comparison. In practice, it doesn't. This is because doing anything at all prevents the CPU from entering the lowest power using modes (which go beyond simply dropping in frequency).

So it's more efficient to make the CPU run at full blast, do whatever needs to be done, then go to sleep (C3, not suspend to RAM), than to do the same work at a lower clock speed, keeping the CPU active 3 or 4 times longer. By C2 the clock isn't active anymore, which is a huge gain on anything the "powersave" governor can provide.

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[badpazzword]

I am sorry I wasn't clear enough. The problem is that my CPU will overheat and the computer will shutoff if the CPU runs at full blast for too long, which is exactly what happens with ondemand during a distro upgrade.

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[badpazzword]

The applet was my first attempt of course. The command line command was my second. sudo was my third. Tinkering with policy-tool as root was my fourth.

I guess my fifth attempt should have been the refrigerator. >.<

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry I wasn't clear enough. The problem is that my CPU will overheat and the computer will shutoff if the CPU runs at full blast for too long, which is exactly what happens with ondemand during a distro upgrade.

So many snarky responses possible-
Must ... resist ... posting ... one ...

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[karnal]

Sounds like you have a hardware problem, not a software problem.

Can you limit the max bus speed within the bios to hard-limit the max speed of the processor?

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[vadim_t]

Ok, I can suggest some workarounds then.

First, you can manually force the governor with this as root:

echo "powersave" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

If that still doesn't work, you can try upgrading from the commandline, with:

$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d

Since this is on the commandline, you can press Ctrl+Z at any time to temporarily interrupt the upgrade process. Then use the "fg" command to resume it again.

Still, overheating isn't something that should normally happen. Maybe you have a clogged or defective fan?

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[UncleTogie]

Is there some reason that temporarily disabling scaling in your BIOS settings wouldn't have worked?

Jus' curious...

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[badpazzword]

I have a three years old fan in non-optimal conditions and no thermal devices to tell the kernel to slow down.

I use the cpu governor applet as my lazy way to workaround this issue. However during the upgrade, a glitch in policy-tool disallowed /all/ users from changing it; programs gave weird error messages and did nothing. Upon completing the upgrade, everything was back to normal.

(crossposted. Sorry for the multiple derails.)

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[badpazzword]

Unfortunately, I am not aware of any such setting in my BIOS.

Other than that, at times it's handy to be able to give short bursts of full speed when I really need it.

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[Anonymous Coward]

The ondemand governor could still be of some help.

Try:
# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
to get a list of available processor frequencies.

Then pick the maximum frequency that won't overheat your system and
# echo <MAX_SAFE_FREQUENCY_GOES_HERE> > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

Better than nothing :-)

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[The Analog Kid]

Why don't you try an aftermarket cooling solution. A bigger heat sink and fan should do the trick for your overheating problems. There are plenty of options out there and most of them aren't that expensive.

Re:8.10 upgrade glitch: downclocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Ondemand is GENERALLY the best governor. But if a system is undercooled like his apparently is, it's not -- if he has enough cooling for 50W of heat production, he can't run the CPU at 60W for extended periods; it would save power overall, but the system will get too hot and shut down.

        The best policy is to NOT change the governor from what the user has set it to. Note, Canonical etc. DO fix upgrade bugs along with all the other ones, so maybe it'll do this in the future.

Hey mods...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Whoosh.

Mod this +5 Funny so we can see it for the sarcasm it is.

(If it's not sarcasm, of course, you are a sad little man.)

Re:Hey mods...

[harry666t]

It's not funny and it's not sarcasm. It's the same cliche meme repeated a thousandth time. LOL, p2p is helping terrorism, mod me funny. I could write a python one-liner that would produce more varied content than most of these +5, funnies all over here on /.

I even actually wrote it:

$ python -c 'print (lambda words, random: " ".join([random.choice(words)[:-1] for i in range(random.randint(1,10))]))(open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines(), __import__("random"))+"."'

angoras lawgiver's Father's approbations uninteresting inferring Antonio's Clotho's chlorine.

Re:Hey mods...

[BigBuckHunter]

I even actually wrote it:

Great! Now convert it all to caps, and add an exclamation point after each sentence. It will be indistinguishable from a Slashdot poster.

It's about time we got a new AliceBot.

BBH

Re:Hey mods...

[Haeleth]

Ugh. Why do people write Python one-liners? The whole point of Python is that it's nicely formatted and readable. If you want one-liners, you should choose a language that was designed for writing one-liners in.

perl -le 'open W,"/usr/share/dict/words"; chomp(@w=<W>); print "@w[map rand $#w, 0..rand 9]"'

=> Styx's heaviest throes Yerevan's seamen pecks moll

Literally half the length, and the logic is easier to follow. Save Python for jobs where it's the right tool.

Re:Hey mods...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fail.

Re:Hey mods...

[harry666t]

> Why do people write Python one-liners?

Because

1. I can.

2. I suck at Perl.

3. I like packing up a lot of logic into a single Python expression. It feels a little more like I'm dealing with pure math.

Irony

[digitalderbs]

that a site advising the use of p2p to prevent the meltdown of servers has itself been slashdotted.

On a side note : web data and pages themselves could be p2p distributed too, no? Say a peer gets a webpage's hash (containing html and images) and the date/time of expiry for a webpage from a server. If other peers have that page (html+images), and it's up to date, you could download their copy. Otherwise, the server sends a fresh copy to you, and you seed it for others. Not being in computer science, I'm sure this has been proposed before and that there are glaring shortcomings I have missed.

Re:Irony

[slashdotmsiriv]

Two projects that do what you say that I know of:

http://flashback.calit2.uci.edu/apache2-default/

http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/2009/04/firecoral-iptps/

Re:Irony

[Kjella]

Well, first it screws with hit counters and any other type of dynamic content. Tben you get quite a few round trips, first one to the server asking for hash and expirery, then if you want it via p2p you have to get some peers, then you have to request from them, maybe they've left the swarm, are dead slow, feeding you junk data or whatever until finally you hopefully get a good verison. Plus you need people willing to p2p your site which people don't understand and suddenly they blame your site for making internet slow and whatnot. 99% it's some dynamic CMS or whatever that goes down, not the static pages anyway so it's just not solving very much.

Re:Irony

[skeeto]

This is a little bit like the way Freenet works, but it also has a bunch of performance-cost anonymizing measures in place too.

It should be enabled by default

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it should just be enabled by default, maybe it will take massive legitimate P2P use to force ISPs to stop throttling P2P connections. It's a chicken and egg scenario... do we wait for them to stop throttling P2P to make heavy use of it, or do we make heavy use of it and force ISPs to stop throttling it? I don't think they will just do it out of the kindness of their hearts, so it will take a demonstration to make it happen.

Apt-Cacher

[AusIV]

I plan to upgrade directly from the Ubuntu servers, but I'm only going to hit their servers once for the three machines I'm upgrading. I use apt-cacher, which stores packages on the local network once they've been downloaded by something on the network, then sends out the cached version when it's requested again. It doesn't help much for the odd day-to-day package installation, but it makes significant upgrades much faster after the first system. You have to configure all of the systems to use the proxy, but it's easy to setup. If you run more than one or two systems, I'd definitely look into it.

Re:Apt-Cacher

[prefec2]

apt-cacher is great stuff and I strongly recommend it for setups with 2 or more machines. It svaes mirror bandwidth and your own bandwidth. So it is a time saver and for those of us who do not have the luxury of a flatrate, it svaes money too.

Re:Apt-Cacher

[Aladrin]

I used that when I was running multiple Kubuntu machines in my house and it was definitely worthwhile, and fairly easy to set up.

I was actually wondering if anyone would recommend this method.

Re:Apt-Cacher

[marco.antonio.costa]

I tried it a little, it seemed quite nice, but does it work flawlessly with updates too? An ubuntu forum post said it didn't.

And do you have any problems with cpu usage on the server? Mine sometimes spiked to 100% and stayed there.

Re:Apt-Cacher

[supernova_hq]

Doesn't work so well when you have a 64 bit laptop, a 32 bit laptop and a 32 bit server :(

Re:If you want to get the new release when it's ho

[drinkypoo]

Is Alt-F2 "run" in your shiny little world? It never has been for me, and still isn't. On the other hand, I did use Compiz and gmrun to make Super+R run programs.

Partitions are your friend

[mangu]

I have yet to have an Ubuntu distro update smoothly, ever.

Me too. Often it's quicker to do a full install from scratch.

But that won't stop me, onward I will plunge headlong into it with abandon. I don't like my data anyway.

That's why my systems always have at least two different partitions: one for "/" and another for "/home". I can reformat my system partition and still have my data intact.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

Say what?

eselect profile set default/linux/amd64/2009.0/desktop
emerge --update world

(go get some industrial coffee)

Done!

Re:Partitions are your friend

[QuantumRiff]

I have never understood why Ubuntu doesn't format partitions this way by default when you use the default "automatic" partitioning scheme..

Re:Partitions are your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

Potential waste of disk space since there is no automatic way of knowing if the user is going to install lots of large packages or not. Nothing is more annoying than running out of space on /home and having 2 - 3 gb left on /

Re:Partitions are your friend

[Sancho]

LVM should help with that, though. Separate /boot / and /home partitions, with / and /home resizeable.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[solafide]

LVM = hell when you break something.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[Moxon]

As I recall, the ubuntu installer is pretty helpful about deleting everything except /home if you install to a previously used "one-big-filesystem". I don't remember exactly how it goes, but I think it asks if this is what you want by default, kind of "this filesystem seems to already have been used for a linux install" kind of thing.

(and in case that bit breaks, I keep 6 months worth of daily rdiff-backup of my home directory on a different computer)

Re:Partitions are your friend

[rincebrain]

Not going to help you - most filesystems are growable but not shrinkable online.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[tinkerghost]

LVM is a nightmare when you cross drives with it - it's like having a striped drive - any problem to either one will destroy the entire volume.

Right now I'm configured with:

• /boot (as it says)
• / (duh)
• /home (yep)
• /shared (file sharing, web, music/video server files)
• /swap (duh)

The separate /boot partition should tell you how old my system started. I had to rebuild the drive because the 8.10 installer required more space than the /boot partition had. Moving & growing the first partition on the drive was a bit nerve wracking.

The /shared and /home partitions are on a second drive that I disconnect prior to doing any updates. That way, if something goes horribly wrong, I just wipe & reinstall. Once it works, I edit fstab to map them back in.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[jamstar7]

I have yet to have an Ubuntu distro update smoothly, ever.

Me too. Often it's quicker to do a full install from scratch.

Guess I've just been lucky, my upgrades have been relatively easy since Dapper. Important thing to remember is, before doing the upgrade, do an apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade so you're upgrading against the latest fixes.

That's why my systems always have at least two different partitions: one for "/" and another for "/home". I can reformat my system partition and still have my data intact.

I like a seperate /var partition as well. I've got some fairly large sized mysql databases and I don't wanna lose them every time I turn around and fresh install. Yes, I have daily backups of my mysql databases, tarred & gzipped into a directory in my home partition. But backups are for emergency use only. It's up to me to make sure I don't shoot my foot off.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[smoker2]

LVM is a nightmare when you cross drives with it - it's like having a striped drive - any problem to either one will destroy the entire volume.

Not true.
You might lose whatever is on the failed drive, but the rest of the volume should be fine. I've installed and configured LVM manually on FC4, and I use it for a large media directory spanning 5 sata drives. I had 1 drive fail fairly early in its life ,and lost only file descriptors for maybe 3 or 4 files. I had to recreate the volume using the standard LVM metadata backups and there were all my files ( minus the 3 or 4 that had data on the dead drive). I don't like using it on / so I still have a 40GB ide holding that. I symlink as needed to directories on the LVM volume.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[pizzach]

Yup. I had the same problem. That is one of the things I will be rue-ing ubuntu about for a while. If I remember correctly, the drive was set up like this:

1 - boot (ext2)
2 - windows/shared (ntfs)
3 - / root

Because I couldn't use gparted as it would fail, I learned the magic of TestDisk combined with your standard ntfsprogs in the command line. In the end I managed to get JUST enough space to shrink the NTFS image and stick it into a file on / root. Resize boot. Then copy the image back in the new place. Then use TestDisk to make windows bootable again in it's new position.

It was a horrible few hours of work.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[cr_nucleus]

That's why my systems always have at least two different partitions: one for "/" and another for "/home". I can reformat my system partition and still have my data intact.

To elaborate on this, what i do is use several smaller system partitions so that i can install different distros (as it turns out, different versions of ubuntu).

If i don't like the one i just installed, i switch to the previous one with no harm done.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[JackieBrown]

For me /home
/ /usr/local /media/left_over_space_1 /media/left_over_space_2

root gets the smallest, followed by local, and the rest goes to home.

I toy with the idea of setting up /var on its own partition (or at least /var/cache) but it does not interest me enough to be worth repartitioning my hard drive. That might change if Time Warner hits my region with that tier program.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[JackieBrown]

I guess / is a tag or something because mine looked liked tinter's until I saved it.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[supernova_hq]

Any tricks to getting /var to go on a separate partition nicely? Every time I try it, the mysql server can't find the files :(

I usually mount all my partitions inside /media/, then "ln -s" the actual points (/home, /var). /home doesn't complain about being a link, but mysql sure throws a fit when /var is a link!

Re:Partitions are your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, I want to do a reinstall so I can spend another 5 hours trying to get my *^&%#)( wireless PCMCIA card to work with Linux again!

Re:Partitions are your friend

[jamstar7]

What I did was, specify a seperate /var partition when I partitioned and set up the disk on install. You have to do this manually, otherwise (at the time, anyways), Ubuntu would just do 2 partitions, / and /home.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[supernova_hq]

So the trick is to mount it "directly" to /var?

I guess that would work, it's just annoying have every external item on my FS as a separate partition instead of folders on a secondary partition.

Re:Partitions are your friend

[jamstar7]

Manually partiton your disk. You can then specify which partitions are attached to which mountpoints.

Rock solid upgrades

[dudeeh]

I'm not sure why people keep having problems with upgrading their ubuntu machine to newer versions. I have upgraded through most releases (though not always continuously cause for instance i switched to 64 bit recently) and I've never run into any problems really.

apt-p2p works fine

[thegnu]

I set it up about 6 months ago on my girlfriend's computer, and except for when I'm stealing internet and i've got an intermittent connection, it's worked solidly.

ext4?

[mister_playboy]

I was originally planning a full format and reinstall for this release, not only so I could obliterate my Vista partition, but also to take advantage of ext4, which I assume requires a full wipe. Should I just try upgrading in place instead? This news has me reconsidering...

Re:ext4?

[ais523]

You can upgrade ext3 to ext4 in place, although you need to take the system temporarily offline to resize the inodes if you want the result to end up completely as if you were using ext4 all along. You do it simply by mounting an ext3 filesystem as ext4; then ext3 representation is used for all the files that you haven't changed, and ext4 for newly created files since you changed the mount type.

Re:ext4?

[supernova_hq]

Danger Will Robinson!

I have heard many reports of ext3 to ext4 upgrades completely nuking partitions! If you want ext4, I'd strongly suggest a full wipe.

Google Cached Version

[SuperNothing307]

Here's a link to Google's cached version of the blog, in case anyone still wants to read it: http://tinyurl.com/cspfrq

Re:Google Cached Version

[SuperNothing307]

FAIL. Wrong link, my apologies...Google apparently hasn't cached it yet...

Re:If you want to get the new release when it's ho

[badpazzword]

Yes. I'm sorry your little word isn't as shiny as mine (despite my 3 years old shiny little world has a 1.73 GHz CPU that shuts off when it goes at 1.73 GHz, a non-working firefox-3.0, a malfunctioning usplash, a gedit that doesn't quite like zsh, three failed updates, etc.), but my point is very simple.

If you want to run the latest and greatest software (and you want to run all the risks this takes) you may as well get it a bit sooner than the rest so that you can report bugs before the actual release, and so that you can help balance the network load... provided the thing boots after the release ;)

Re:If you want to get the new release when it's ho

[Rog-Mahal]

I've tried upgrading with beta a few times, and it can be pretty dicey, especially if you have customised config files or packages from non-Ubuntu repos. Net upgrades have never gone off without some major hitches in my experience. Plus, it's kind of nice to wait for the official release and do some spring cleaning. Net upgrade may be a good idea if you have a box just for experimenting, but I wouldn't recommend it for your daily driver.

Re:If you want to get the new release when it's ho

[badpazzword]

Typo: "provided the thing boots after the upgrade."

Mirror anxiety

[blake182]

Is it just me or is the fun game of "pick your closest mirror" not very fun at all? Just download the damn thing at best possible speed. I don't care where you get it from.

As if I'm in a position to pick the best site where to download something from. Give me a break. Apologies to the power users who can lick their Ethernet cable and tell which site will have the best download performance and availability.

Re:Mirror anxiety

[turbidostato]

"Is it just me or is the fun game of "pick your closest mirror" not very fun at all? Just download the damn thing at best possible speed. I don't care where you get it from. "

You are aware that "closest" in this context means "faster", aren't you?

"As if I'm in a position to pick the best site where to download something from. Give me a break. Apologies to the power users who can lick their Ethernet cable and tell which site will have the best download performance and availability."

Probably is too much a power user the one able to install the package "apt-spy" which will build a sources.list for you based on bandwith probes, isn't it?

Oh, and please, don't let parent post at +Insigthful when it's plain -Nonsense.

Re:Mirror anxiety

[jonaskoelker]

Probably is too much a power user the one able to install the package "apt-spy" which will build a sources.list for you based on bandwith probes, isn't it?

Hey, thanks for mentioning the apt-spy trick---this praticular power user didn't know about it.

And if it works so great, why don't I get it and its associated shorter download times by deafult? Then I don't have to spend time on that...

Also, If I bask in thy leetness will you consider the usability benefits of not asking the user too many questions, especially when they can be answered at the cost of a little bandwidth and CPU time?

Re:Mirror anxiety

[blake182]

You are aware that "closest" in this context means "faster", aren't you?

Is your point that a host that's connected via T-1 that's a mile away is faster than a host that's connected on an OC-3 3,000 miles away? That is, based on knowing the geographic location of a host, you're saying it's somehow an indication of how fast my download will complete? That's the only thing that matters to me -- when will I have my completed bits. My only point here is that the information given in mirror selection is not enough to pick the "fastest" way to get what I want. It lists the geographical location and that's it.

Probably is too much a power user the one able to install the package "apt-spy" which will build a sources.list for you based on bandwith probes, isn't it?

Yes. Yes it is. If such a list can be generated, then why not just generate it in normal operation or list the mirrors based on the output of that tool? Though I do appreciate the tip, and I will try it. Obviously bandwidth and availability varies on a day by day basis. So taking a snapshot at one point in time seems like it will get stale.

Oh, and please, don't let parent post at +Insigthful when it's plain -Nonsense.

It's a legitimate end-user concern. "Which mirror should I select" should not be a user problem. The user wants his bits as soon as possible, which is a technical problem that has allegedly been solved with apt-spy. If that's the case, we should probably integrate that with the mirror selection process, and then you don't have to put up with all the "Nonsense".

Re:Mirror anxiety

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Australian ISPs host mirrors for the popular distros (usually at least fedora, opensuse, debian, ubuntu and a flavour or two of bsd). Perhaps your ISP does too, but you're just too lazy to find out?

Re:Mirror anxiety

[fyoder]

apt-spy doesn't appear to be available for ubunutu 8.04

Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "apt-spy"

Here's an interesting page which mentions an alternative called netselect-apt

http://www.go2linux.org/find_the_fastest_debian_mirror-apt-spy_and_netselect-apt

Comment there also refers to an option in synaptic for accomplishing this. Here is a page which describes how to. That's probably easiest, unless its a command line only server or something.

Re:Mirror anxiety

[Anonymous Coward]

You are aware that "closest" in this context means "faster", aren't you?

I'm not. The mirror choices are identified by geography, not throughput. If you're saying the geographically closer mirror is faster, I disagree based on the experience of a slow local. If you mean something else, kindly explain.

I've only used Ubuntu since 5.10 and didn't know about apt-spy, so I guess I'm not a power user. And fool that I am I just checked Google and see it's for Debian mirrors, not Ubuntu. Launchpad but 1780 indicates it was briefly included with Dapper, then pulled back out of the repositories for that reason.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt-spy/+bug/1780
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=apt-spy

What was that you were saying about -Nonsense?

Re:Mirror anxiety

[turbidostato]

"Is your point that a host that's connected via T-1 that's a mile away is faster than a host that's connected on an OC-3 3,000 miles away?"

No. My point is that whitin this context when someone says "closer" he's indeed saying "faster". I know that's untrue, but it's not me the one using closer for faster and this whole thread was about "non power users" so while not correct it's close enough (at least for those not nitpickers).

"Yes. Yes it is. If such a list can be generated, then why not just generate it in normal operation"

If choosing "nearest" mirror is so complex for a "non power user" then the default (which is choosing the mirror from your own country) is good enough (choosing the fastest mirror *now* is not without its own concerns). Non power users can stand losing some kbits on the odd update from time to time at the expense of having "good enough" on the majority of cases (you are using "stable", don't you? you are a non power user, remember?).

"Obviously bandwidth and availability varies on a day by day basis. So taking a snapshot at one point in time seems like it will get stale."

Obviously. Then why go with hassle *for non-power users* of such a tool and the compromises it takes when there's already a good enough working solution for vast majority of users whitout the needed knowledge?

"It's a legitimate end-user concern."

It is not the concern the one I told to be "-nonsense" but the reasoning and arguments supporting it.

""Which mirror should I select" should not be a user problem."

That's why when installing at default priority level the system won't ask you to select a mirror but will offer you one out of you country's selection which, on average, will be good enough.

"The user wants his bits as soon as possible"

The non-savvy user want a lot of things, sometimes contradictory (it's just logical: he is non-savvy) so usually the best approach is not offering him the choice but a good enough compromise -which, by the way, it's current behaviour. The savvy user will know his way out the problem and the system will assist him if possible (in this case through apt-spy).

"If that's the case, we should probably integrate that with the mirror selection process"

Then you are free to propose it *on the proper forum* or even offer your patch. Maybe then you'd realize what the technical problems of the approach are and properly evaluate if the alledged benefit from current situation is worth *your* effort.

Re:Mirror anxiety

[marco.antonio.costa]

Apt-spy... Good lord, what will they come up with next?

Re:Mirror anxiety

[trawg]

"Which mirror should I select" should not be a user problem.

I would probably agree as a default, but would qualify this a little further by saying it should be a user /option/. We've had all sorts of problems in Australia with applications that try to helpfully select a mirror based on some criteria - instead of downloading from a local mirror you get forced to some random international site. Steam does this a lot.

The /. effect

[Anonymous Coward]

URL is slashdotted... damnit.

Keep it simple...

[jones_supa]

I think using P2P in APT is an unnecessary gimmick. It adds too much overhead and complexity to the mere process of downloading a few packages. Plus the added concern of security. Normal Ubuntu mirrors work just fine. I don't think their bandwidth will really be exhausted any time soon.

Re:Keep it simple...

[supernova_hq]

You've never tried to download from the servers on release day have you? There's a reason I always grab my ISO's off the torrents (then seed from my server while upgrading my other machines).

Following Mandriva's lead

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandriva has been doing torrent releases for years, with great success. The trick is to do an early release to a number of trusted users with good internet connections to act as 'early seeders'.

This Account Has Been Suspended

[xjlm]

Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible. Or at least that's what the link says.

Bit Torrent

[Zoko Siman]

I'm downloading the x64 Jaunty Beta right now via bit torrent at a rate of 2 MB/sec. I'm saturating my 16 Mbps connection :-)

Re:Bit Torrent

[supernova_hq]

Makes sense. 2MB = 16Mb (8 bits per Byte).

Sounds like you're getting a perfect connection to me! (or did you do that on purpose, I'm bad at detecting sarcasm in text...)

howtoforge

[lems1]

The original link was dead. This is from howtoforge:

http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu-using-apt-p2p-for-faster-upgrades-from-hardy-to-intrepid

Think twice

[Anonymous Coward]

Did this with 8.10 and weeks later wondered why some 'bot was chewing my CPU and net bandwidth. The 'bot was of course apt-p2p happily doing the p2p thing. It got annoying enough that I had to be a leecher and uninstall it.

Is upgrading worthwhile?

[teslatug]

I've never done OS upgrades (Windows or Linux). Do people trust OS upgrades in general and Ubuntu specifically? I figure there is way too many changes, and companies can't afford the needed QA to test all the upgrade scenarios. I'm curious to know what people experience. I guess I might try the Ubuntu upgrade and see what happens (of course I'll always have that nagging feeling, and if any crashes happen I'll probably blame the upgrade).

Re:Is upgrading worthwhile?

[3vi1]

Upgrades of Linux distributions work much better than Windows distributions because of the library structure and package dependancy system.

If you try to upgrade a library on Linux to a new version that cannot coexist with a previous version that other apps depend on, the new package will be set up so that it tells you it needs to remove the old library and its dependent apps if you really want to proceed.

There's also not going to be a lot of garbage hanging around in a "registry". If a package doesn't work because of settings, they're easily removed from /etc (or a '.' directory in your home directory, for personal settings) and can in no way be harming unrelated apps.

On Windows.... I agree that clean installs are the better policy.

Re:Is upgrading worthwhile?

[3vi1]

BTW: One of my test systems, now at 9.04, started at 7.04, and has been updated solely through ugrades.

There have been minor upgrade issues, but nothing that wasn't quickly resolved with a Google search.

In normal operation, it's just as stable as the other three machines where I've generally done clean installs (so that I could try new filesystems and such).

Re:Is upgrading worthwhile?

[pseudonomous]

My opinion is that stable versioning upgrades can be problematic. I like the "rolling release" distros much better, becuase the upgrades are much less massive in scope, and you're ussaully using software that's much more recent then you would be with something like Debian stable. Things occassionally do break on upgrade, but since you are ussaully not upgrading every package on your system, it's ussaully pretty easy to pinpoint what's causing the problem.

Re:Is upgrading worthwhile?

[Anonymous Coward]

My main desktop (I dual boot with XP) started off with Ubuntu 6.04 and is now at Ubuntu 8.10 through updates.

The major update issues I had early on were with custom modifications to xorg (because of my nVidia graphics driver). These are no longer an issue. Although, if you have changed some important system configuration file, it's worth checking that other people did not experience any issues with the previous Ubuntu update.

Later on I had an issue with my wireless setup. I had it auto-connect my a root script, and then it was supposed to be done using a new tool (NetworkManager Applet and such). I couldn't auto-connect any more to my wireless without some tweaks and after resuming standby or hibernation. If there's anything fundamentally new in an upcoming release, it's definitely worth checking out how other people fared on migration (eg. pulseaudio transition - which did not affect my system).

Lastly. And this is important. Do NOT, for any reason, update your main computer to an alpha or beta version of Ubuntu. I did for 8.10 because I liked the idea of tabs in Nautilius, etc. This was a disaster in that my video card ceased to work for a few days (had to manually fix the problem in terminal logon), shut down did not work, garbage bin could not be accessed, and certain packages were not entirely stable. I will not be doing this again. There's a reason why they say not to install on production machines.

PS - I an posting AC because I don't want to waste a mod. Also, my computer has been working fine ever since updating to release day packages of Ubuntu 8.10.

No video drivers

[Dwedit]

I'd love to upgrade Ubuntu, but I can't, because there are no working drivers for the SiS video card found in the Intel D201GLY2 motherboard.
The official patched drivers from Intel only work with older versions of Xorg, and nobody has updated Intel's code for the newer version of Xorg.
This bug has been around since at least Hardy. But Hardy had the third-party fix available, and subsequent versions did not. I guess I'm stuck with Hardy.

Re:No video drivers

[cptnapalm]

If memory serves, there is a way to mark some packages as "Do not update". Never done it, but I know it is in there somewhere... Dig around Synaptic and google a bit. Might have to keep an old X, but might still be able to upgrade most everything else.

apt-spy considered dangerous

[kostmo]

and according to this bug, "apt-spy is no longer in the Ubuntu repository for releases newer than feisty."

Apt URL

[symbolset]

apt-p2p

Hopefully clicking this link will stand in for the "apt-get install apt-p2p"

Yep. This is going to be fun.

Re:Apt URL

[supernova_hq]

Worked for me (64 bit jaunty beta using firefox).

MonkeyMan ISP

[LandruBek]

Does Steve Ballmer run your ISP?

Re:MonkeyMan ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

hahaha! because steve balmer throws chairs! oh god this is HILARIOUS! You sir are my favourite poster on Slashdot and exactly why I come back every day to read this site. There is nothing better than a really good stale chair joke that really didn't have anything to do with the topic at hand. But you still managed to do it. God I wish Natalie Portman would come back with a bowl of grits. What happened to this site?

Nope..

[destiney]

There's ext4 to be had.. I'm not upgrading, I'm reinstalling.

Re:Nope..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you're using ext2 or ext3 you can non-destructively convert your filesystems over.

Re:Another great idea

[Ice Station Zebra]

More great moderation by the "linux can do no wrong" people (this is written on a Linux machine). Anyone want to bet on which Linux distro will be the first to have a windows type virus (without running network services such as bind)? My thoughts are that someday, someone will fuck up and the next "upgrade" you do will result in your being part of a very large bot net, along with all your windows using compatriots.

Now, don't get me wrong, I still won't switch to openbsd. I'd rather use two cans and a string.

Much slower.

[Anonymous Coward]

switching to apt-p2p was very much slower for me than just using my fastest mirror.

Seeding during a reboot?

[supernova_hq]

So how does seeding work with this? My upload cap is MUCH lower than my download, so if it only seeds while you are upgrading, I sure wouldn't meet 1.0 ratio (or the 2.0 I usually aim for).

Limit sharing to one business/home

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be possible to prefer connections to devices on the same LAN ?

How it the source of a package picked, at random ?