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Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Norsefire writes to mention a Register piece reporting that early adopters are having a tough time with Karmic Koala, Ubuntu's latest release. "Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums." What has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?
I've had a fairly painless upgrade from Jaunty on two laptops and a desktop. What is weird for me is how it interacted with VirtualBox; after the upgrade, my username was missing from the vboxusers group and my XP VMs no longer saw the USB hub; easy to fix once I figured it out, but really frustrating.
The original article was itself a troll worthy of comp.os.linux.advocacy and not really terribly impressive.
Old kernel? What a tragedy! Did you not pay attention to the prompts during the upgrade?
One wonders how much of this stuff is self-inflicted in some fashion or another.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
My primary desktop at home, a 2nd desktop at work, and before release, I had the beta and then RC running in VM's for a few weeks. None of these had problems. Then again most of this is on older hardware (p4's with similar era video cards, etc).
Ubuntu needs to put a YMMV disclaimer :P
No sig for you!!
I upgraded my wife's system - which is on a Japanese laptop and everything seems to have gone fairly smoothly. I was concerned when it asked me for the keyboard settings, but it seems to have respected my original settings nonetheless. Boot times seem a bit nicer and she hasn't complained of any stability issues. It's definitely gone a lot smoother than past upgrades which were extremely unstable on her system, X often crashing, windows becoming unresponsive, or the arty completely bombing out for no reason.
Canonical has made no secret of the fact that deadlines are more important to them than milestones. They shoot (ostensibly) for "usability", not stability.
It runs better than 9.04 on this machine that I am using. This is a K6-3D/400 with 256M and 10G drive. It was upgraded from 7.04 - 16 hours per release.
Issues since 9.10...
Failure during boot get Xwindows/gnome to start. On new log on screen is now a choice of gnome and safe gnome. Just change to the other one and boots OK.
During first boot Netscape kept kicking errors about xorg. Those when a way on second full boot.
Do not like new update apt just showing up with a click. Liked better the icon in tool bar.
My experience upgrading 9.04 to 9.10 Kubuntu:
I needed to make room to upgrade, because the 4 Gb SSD in the EEE was close to full. I have my /home partition on the 12 Gb SSD, so I needed to clean out things like the apt cache. Eventually, I had to remove some bigger packages like Picasa (with Wine) and Open Office to free up enough space on /.
With 50 Mb more than it claims it wanted, it finally started.
Halfway thru the upgrade, it froze and I had to reboot. Packages had been downloaded, but not all installed.
I had to reboot using a rescue USB stick and chroot over to the main disk. I tried an apt-get dist-upgrade and it said the system was hosed, and suggested a dpkg -a something rescue command. I did that and it finished processing the files it had. I then rebooted into "recovery mode" on that version, and did the dist-upgrade again and it finished. Another reboot and it was successfully in a normal login.
I logged in and immediately did and apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get autoremove to get the half-dozen updates and clean things up. I then added back in Open Office and a few other missing packages that I cleaned out to make space.
The only thing I can say is in the end, it worked. I've had upgrade horrors like this before with Slackware -- which I have *NEVER* successfully upgraded. They *ALL* had to be re-installs, which is one of the big reasons why I no longer use Slackware. In the past, upgrades have gone smoothly with (K)Ubuntu, as well as my CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat systems. This one was one of the worst.
It is nice, one running. Very slick, and I am mostly quite happy with the way it operates. The only bug I've bumped into that is new is if I'm running on battery, and the battery gets low enough for the system to issue a warning, kicker dies. No, I haven't reported it, yet. Probably later tonight I'll see if I can get a backtrace and send it over.
My experience would have really stumped a Linux noob. There needs to be a bit more Q&A. I got the feeling there was a bit of "let's push out on the Windows 7 day, no matter what" going on.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 and it is quite buggy. Much more than previous releases. I have had to go back to the NDIS wrapper to use my WG511 PCMCIA wifi adapter. I haven't had to do that in years.
My observations.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The upgrade was a bit rough - the GUI system update tools are very prone to breaking, often freezing to the point that only a forcequit can put things back to normal (I almost always use the command line because of that). Unfortunately the only way I knew of to update to 9.10 was using a GUI tool, which naturally broke, forcing me to restart the upgrade (although it was called a "partial upgrade". As for the finished product, booting time is abysmal, pushing past 100 sec. and the wireless doesn't work without a driver (it worked flawlessly in 9.04), and even with the driver whenever I move around any new wireless networks I come across aren't recognized - I need to suspend/unsuspend to restart the wireless system and get the new access points recognized. And the monitor randomly shuts off once in a while. And the mouse (trackpad) moves erratically sometimes.
Either I should switch to some other distro or I need better hardware.
All 3 to Karmic. All 3 work great. None are even remotely similar hardware wise. As an added bonus the power saving on my laptop works better than my wife's Vista machine now which is definitely a great upgrade.
I've been using it since the morning it came out (before it showed up on the home page, but was on the mirrors).
I haven't had any show stopping problems. I've found it to be waaay better than 9.04. The sound works far better (it used to not work for some apps), as does compiz.
Oddly, the only thing that didn't work about Ubuntu One. It complained that I had a version too new for the servers. *shrug*
It's also important to note the difference between LTS and 10 release. If you want stable you stick with LTS. This has been the case for at least as long as I've been an Ubuntu user. The thing that pisses me off to no end is that pain you have to go through to get a xen kernel on Ubuntu which makes it a pain in the ass to install in VM on XenServer. Ended up creating PV VM, using a Debian kernel, and then creating a VM template. So when I create a new VM I resize the disk to be what I need. Of course there are other errors, tcpdump and dhclient on my Ubuntu server installs seems to error on bootup with Debian but fortunately for me, it's a server so I just removed dhclient. Probably just going to remove AppArmor too since that seems to be causing the tcpdump error. A lot of effort just for a PV setup when it all works by default with Windows. Of course SUSE, Fedora, CentOS all work fine with their regular installers.
I wish I could mod you up. For the record, I love Ubuntu, but I tend to run only the LTS releases. They are the ones that Canonical and the community put all their effort into for running production systems. I have never had a problem upgrading dapper (6.06 LTS) to Hardy (8.04 LTS), but I have had small problems with some of the intermediate releases.
:)
I had been playing with Karmic-server on VMs for about a month now, but nothing production. Finally I popped a liveCD onto my laptop, played around in Karmic, realized everything worked beautifully, and bit the bullet and a few dist upgrades from Hardy to Karmic. I have not regretted it, but if someone does have problems with the newer possibly less-stable software, they should be sticking with the LTS releases. If you want to push the limit, try new software, you can run the newest release whether or not it's LTS. If you would like to try before you mess with your production system, use the liveCD or make a BACKUP that you know how to restore from. Sheesh....
Sorry to the people who have problems, but I'd have to say my system feels a lot faster now. Boots faster, and compiz with all its 3d effects are a lot smoother with on my builtin intel card than they ever were with previous releases. I am a happy karmic user
Exactly. I have been using Karmic from a clean install without major issues, but upgrade killed my sound. Note that I did have OSS4 configured on 9.04 before the upgrade.
One thing I have noticed (and I haven't used other distros to see if this is a common phenomena) is that upgrading Ubuntu is temperamental when it comes to non-standard configurations/customisations (e.g. removing pulseaudio or totem).
Windows: Don't adopt until Service Pack 1
Ubuntu: Don't adopt until 1-2 months after release
Microsoft, Canonical, et. al. are in an interesting position. You need a large number of testers running on a wide variety of hardware (intel, nvidia, ati, ...) with a wide variety of configurations (gnome, KDE, modified sound configurations, heavily modified/customised), needs and requirements (a DJ/sound studio will have different requirements to someone who just wants email). If people don't use the OS because it is 'buggy', the bugs are not found and no fixes are released. Hopefully, they will get good coverage over the alpha and beta phases, then a wider adoption with the enthusiasts and early adopters, followed later by your "average" "novice" user.
Plus, Karmic and other Linux distros are not equivalent to Windows; they are equivalent to Windows, Office, Photoshop and a whole host of other applications, all updated and packaged every 6 months (for karmic, main is about 6.7 GiB and universe is in the 25 GiB mark, not sure about multiverse). That's a lot of stuff to ensure is working on everyones machines.
Is that why the last LTS had Firefox 3.0 beta 4 installed on it, as well as an unstable and poorly supported soundsystem? Im a fan of ubuntu too, but lets not try to claim that ANY of their releases are anything other than bleeding edge beta quality releases. Ubuntu tends to be most stable several months after the release, even moreso than other distros / OSes.
From that point on, yes - everything works and everything boots normally now. It didn't handle an unexpected reboot in the middle of the upgrade gracefully, but I don't know any consumer OS that reliably does.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Make sure your GRUB shows the new 2.6.31 kernel. When I upgraded, the kernel installed, but it didn't run update-grub, and so my GRUB menu didn't show the new kernel. When it booted into the old kernel, I had the same problem as you, where it showed that no audio devices were installed. Merely booting into the proper new kernel fixed it.
Because when you go to download it, it asks you which version you want. It even explains the LTS thing.
THL phish sticks
Haha, I was about to post something like that. For the vast majority of users it isn't that bad, but there does seem to be a certain acceptance among devs of the idea that something that worked before may not work now, which I think is a really odd way of thinking.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
What is this 35% of which you speak?
Let's take a full look of that poll as of 8:30 tonight...
So, if we count "got many problems that I've not been able to solve" as failed upgrades (a reasonable thing to say) then 39% of the users who went to that forum have had unsuccessful upgrades.
By simple subtraction then, 61% of the users who went and voted in that poll had a working upgrade (I mean really ...who really upgrades their computer and doesn't expect at least 1 or 2 little issues? ;)
It's worth noting that this post was made from a laptop running an upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 from 9.04 - with 0 issues. It was actually the smoothest and easiest FOSS upgrade I've ever gone through in 10 years. That includes upgrades through the FreeBSD 3.x line (phear make world ;), Redhat, Gentoo (emerge world - gah!), as well as from Ubuntu 6.x through now.
Props to Canonical, Ubuntu is about the cleanest, easiest to use Linux I've ever seen. Keep those releases rolling! :)
Do you use the upgrade function or just reinstall and keep your home directories? I admit I've often done the latter in the past, since it's so easy to install packages as you need them anyway, and packages lying around from the old system have caused me trouble in the past.
But this time it was a bit more serious. I tried to upgrade just using the handy little upgrade button, figuring, what's the worst that can happen, I can just do a full reinstall if it fails.
Then the upgrade program met a package it couldn't uninstall (broken uninstall script returning an error, I think), panicked, and gave up. System was not very usable, so I rebooted.
Or I tried to reboot. The boot process barfed at mounting the file system. Early enough that Ubuntu's "recovery mode" program didn't even get a chance to run.
Let's just say fixing the mess was not something I would want to guide my mother through.
Now that I've done it, though, I'd say the system itself is very nice. Encrypted home directory just works, as do a number of other little things you had to do manually two cycles ago (and yes, those manual changes were the kind that wreaked havoc on the automatic update process).
Ubuntu is progressing nicely, but they need to do more testing on the update function. It just should not, never! leave the system in an unbootable state.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.