Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare"

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

Reports are flooding in to Ubuntu's Installation & Upgrades forum from people having myriad problems with their upgrades. One user described it as a 'nightmare.' Users are producing detailed descriptions of problems but getting little help. This thread has mixed reports and is possibly the most interesting read. Many people report that straightforward upgrades of relatively mundane systems go well, but anything the least bit interesting seems not to have been accounted for, like software RAID, custom kernels, and Opera. Even the official upgrade method doesn't work for everyone, including crashes of the upgrade tool in the middle of installing, leaving systems unbootable, no longer recognizing devices (like the console keyboard!), reduced performance, X server crashes, wireless networking problems, the user password no longer working, numerous broken applications, and many even stranger things. Some of this is fairly subjective, with Kubuntu being a bit more problematic than Ubuntu, with reports that Xubuntu seems to have the worst problems, and remote upgrades are something you don't even want to try. Failed upgrades invariably require a complete reinstall. The conclusion from the street, about upgrading to Edgy, is a warning: If you're going to try to take the plunge, be sure to make a backup image of your boot partition before starting the upgrade. Your chances of having the upgrade be a total failure are high. If you're really dead-set on upgrading, you'll save yourself a lot of time and headache by backing up all of your personal files manually and doing a fresh install (don't forget to save your bookmarks!).

interesting

My network ports got flipped around (eth1 and eth0 got mapped onto different hardware).

IMO, you shouldn't have to submit a bug to be able to complain. Writing a good bug report is a fair amount of work, and if you're expected to do it whenever the OS whenever the OS has issues, then that OS is suddenly a lot of extra work to use.

Re:interesting

Well,

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

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

;-)

Re:interesting

Submitting a good bug report is a fair amount of work: you need to check for dupes, lay out the conditions necessary to reproduce it, give details like your hardware, etc. This is a lot more work than the work necessary to, say Google something, or read a man page, yet we already know that this is too much to expect from most users. If Ubuntu wants things to be easy enough for people that don't know how to google something, then they cannot reasonably expect everyone to submit bug reports.

This is a perception that we need to try very hard to dispel. The most important aspect of a bug tracker is bring people together in one place. A bug is a jigsaw puzzle, with different people having different parts of the puzzle. Some people find ways to trigger the bug, others find ways to accomplish the same thing without triggering the bug, some people fix the flaw in the source code that caused the bug, and some people find how other people fixed the bug. We absolutely need as many people as possible coming together to solve a given bug, in hopes of finding the right combination of the above sets. What we find is that people are perfectly willing to write nasty things on a forum, but for some reason they won't put in the same level of effort into a bug report. This effectively divides that community we needed to build, where people who find bugs complain in one place, people who come up with workarounds and find patches in another, and programmers hiding elsewhere. Writing software to find probable duplicate bug reports should not be a significant challenge in 2006. You said yourself, Google is a good tool used to find how other people solved a bug. It stands to reason that much of the same technology can be applied within say, Launchpad. If writing good bug reports is too hard, we should find ways to make it easier, or find ways to use "bad" bug reports, rather than let everyone give up in isolated desperation.

No probs for me.

I upgraded about 10 boxes or so from Dapper to Edgy - mostly Kubuntu, though, but in various stages of progress for Edgy's release cycle sind Knot 1 - (Edgy is a really nice distro at last, Dapper held many more small annoyances for me, personally) via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/" /etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`) and had no problems whatsoever. In fact, everything worked out a lot smoother than I had expected. So it may have been "a nightmare" _for some_ (how can upgrading a BROWSER turn out a nightmare? At least when there's a working functional equivalent still left on the box...), but upgrading to Edgy is not a nightmare _in general._

Give it a try, I say. You won't be dissappointed.

Re:Yep, bull.

Ubuntu is apt-based. Contrary the the "OS upgrades are typically fraught with trouble" claims of the article, upgrades for debian-like systems are usually flawless -- people do them on a DAILY basis with debian sid and (k)ubuntu's development versions, never mind once every 6 months or so. This article is FUD.

Maybe read the rest of the sentence you quoted: "but previous Ubuntu releases....have done surprisingly well". RTFA is one thing, but Read The Fucking Sentence? Come on.

Also, disagreeing with an article doesn't make it FUD. Perhaps you should tell all the people on the linked to Ubuntu forum that all their upgrades went flawlessly?

It's been out, what, three days?

Users are producing detailed descriptions of problems but getting little help

I remember rushing to try XGL and Compiz the day they were released, and getting nowhere. About a week later the smart people who do such things had figured it out, and I was able to run it, but it was still pretty 'hardcore' and prone to breakage. About three weeks later it was simple.

Don't upgrade on the first day and expect things to go smoothly. You can only be as good as your last RC, and not enough people upgrade them to be able to find all the bugs. Wait a week and then answers will have been found for all the common problems.

Open source is crying out for more QA people. All you have to do is report a bug, or help by triaging the bugs that are there. It's a contribution that almost anyone can make.

It's called Edgy for a reason...

My laptop upgrade went well, but of course successful upgrades don't make up a story.

However, when I tried to get Beryl working, X got broken and I had to reconfigure it manually. I blame it on Nvidia for not opening up the source though. Kudos to everyone involved in Ubuntu, you did a great job!

Can't say I was too impressed with the upgrade

Going from 6.06 to 6.10 was pretty messy on PowerPC (not that I Was surprised - it's a small platform that doesn't get as much QA work) and it did require a complete reinstall. Qtparted seemed to be the source of about 90% of the problems.

On the other hand I was *really* pleased when it was installed. The fresh install was trivially easy and everything works [revis.co.uk] - including wireless with WPA and 3D acceleration. It's about the first time my laptop has been 100% usable as a laptop since I dumped OS X.

So: Minus one point for not upgrading properly. Plus several hundred points for maturity of hardware support. I'm sure that for 7.04 upgrades will be running perfectly :)

Worked for me

Can't speak for anybody else but the upgrade worked perfectly for me. Slightly troubling to see the download speed decrease from 200kb/s down to 55kb/s because the release was Slashdotted midway through my upgrade but I got through it. Perhaps the servers timed out for some and caused problems.

Don't worry!

The problems will all be fixed on Patch Tuesday.

Worked for me and why it happened...

I have been using the development Eft tree ever since they opened it (I like to live on the 'Edge' I guess). I watched new upgrades trickle in over time. The biggest problems were the volumeid changes i.e. referring to the drives using and UUIDs instead of /dev/hd[a-x][0-9] format coupled with a change in udev (and or kernel) that re-mapped the drive order and names. That caused a bit of a headache but I thought it eventually got fixed. Otherwise, there have been no major problems.

The reason I think the upgrade disasters happened is because most developers have been upgrading gradually, over time, just like me. After the release, they assumed upgrading works fine and focused most of the testing on fresh installs. This left the situation of a sudden dist-upgrade from Dapper to Eft un-tested.

In general testing upgrades is pretty difficult. One has to account for X possible previous versions (Dapper, Hoary, Breezy along with mixed software from universe repositories installed by hand) times Y possible hardware configurations. This results in a lot of testing scenarios....

My other take on the situation is that a lot more people are upgrading and therefore there is a total increase in upgrade problems. A year or more ago, there weren't that many Breezy users who upgraded to Dapper (just because there weren't that many Ubuntu users). Now there are a lot more users --- a lot more upgrades --- a lot more upgrade problems.

The change no-one mentioned: bash-dash

As a way to get some scripts to execute faster they changed from using bash as the default shell, to dash. dash breaks compatibility all over the place, none of the extensions found in practically every other bourne shell derivative are there. I first found out about this when someone using one of my scripts reported that 'read -s' (for reading passwords without echoing them) and 'trap function SIGINT' both give errors.

So if the scripts you write are going to be used on Eft, you have to either drop a lot of functionality, or tell users to replace #!/bin/sh with #!/bin/bash (which, of course, only works on Eft; it's /usr/bin/bash elsewhere, /usr/local/bin/bash in other places, bash doesn't come on OS X and BSD but /bin/sh works, etc).

A bit of a reckless move for a bit of extra speed. It would have been more respectable if the Ubuntu team had worked on optimizing bash instead of going for a crippled, but faster, shell.

Re:The change no-one mentioned: bash-dash

This is a symptom of a long-standing misunderstanding about shell scripting.
If you have #!/bin/sh you should be using POSIX shell, which will execute fine in bash, dash or the old sh. People run into problems because they've put #!/bin/sh and then used bash-only syntax - ie they should already have used #!/bin/bash, but didn't because they didn't read any docs and don't know better.

Re:The change no-one mentioned: bash-dash

It would be nice if bash rejected the use of (or at least spewed warnings about) bash-extensions when it is invoked as sh.

dist-upgrade problems

Hi, I make Kubuntu. I'm well aware that dist-upgrade has a lot of problems with upgrading to edgy. That's why porting the upgrade tool from Ubuntu will be a priority for Feisty. In the mean time you can use the Ubuntu upgrade tool on Kubuntu fine or you can dist-upgrade and then explicity tell it to install/upgrade the packages it keeps back.

of Software RAID

The major problem I hit seems to be related to software RAID where the boot is hanging for 6 minutes with a black
screen with no diags. (filed as bug 68888).
This seems to be related to the change to UUID's (which IMHO is horrid even more so than RHELs use of LABELs - I can
remember that my root device was hda1 or has a label of / but anyone who can remember a UUID
of 9d3f7a30-72ef-4d24-947c-3efc6bd9e6b6 should get a job as a memory man or IPV6 coordinator).

However, with that sorted I haven't hit anything else; there were the normal couple of dependency problems
during the dist-upgrade relating to other stuff I'd installed.

Rethink

I'd never consider upgrading a distro like this. Save off your settings and personal files, wipe and reinstall. As many have found, the alternative is asking for trouble.

Even so, let's hope some good comes of this. Perhaps it will encourage the Ubuntu team to take a hard look at what they're doing and where they're at. In retrospect, calling anything like this "Edgy" was a mistake. Ubuntu is aimed at newer and less technically-minded users on the desktop, primarily. That puts a premium on easy, simple and reliable, not on "edgy" as in "the latest gizmos for techies". Techies are not Ubuntu's natural territory. If you want the bleeding edge and all that goes with it, there are 1001 other distros to use. Maybe Ubuntu will decide that its core appeal does not lie in this game, and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, imho, it risks losing the tremendous goodwill it has built up. Ubuntu has never been "just another distro", but if it allows itself to be led only by what developers want, it could easily become one.

Glad I'm Not The Only One!

I suppose this is why, in the past, I did fresh installs rather than upgrades. My upgrade of Dapper to Edgy (Kubuntu) was a nightmare, and is still not straightened out in full.

The first thing I did was to download the Alternate CD image, since I figured it would be better to not have to download it later in the day when I got home and my parents would need the bandwidth for their business stuff (Edgy was released on my 18th birthday).

Now, I had to use the apt-get method of updating, which produced more problems than I've ever had with apt. I had it fail out on me three times. First time was overnight, as it decided it wanted to download most of its stuff over the internet instead of using my CD. It failed to download one little 117kb package and thus completely stopped the upgrade. I continued it when I woke up. The anjunta package just killed the upgrade for some reason, and nothing would make it go, so I ended up getting into Adept and removing it. I then installed the packages that had downloaded and continued the update. It failed out again along the way, and I forget how I straightened that out or what was wrong.

So it was starting to get finicky due to the mismatched parts and whatnot, so once the update finished, at long last, I restarted the thing. To which I found a problem.

X server would not start.

It was the craziest thing! I had a problem similar to this with Dapper that turned out to have something to do with not liking the graphical splash screen that hid the bootup, so I tried booting without it. It dropped me at a command line, and I did what any person who knows even a little about Linux would do: I ran 'startx'.

Error: Xinit not found.
(Not word for word, but I remember something about X failing)

What the hell? So, I figure, it's cool, it's an update, these things happen, though from the noise I'd heard about (K)Ubuntu, I wasn't expecting it. (I'm a former Fedora user) So I decide to hop onto Lynx to see if I can find any information. I keep getting 404 errors all over the place. Nothing will move. After about 15 minutes of this, I realized that, although my eth1 interface was up, it hadn't been configured properly!

sudo ifdown eth1
sudo ifup eth1

All resolved. I then went to my other computer to try and find a resolution to this problem. I searched some forums and found someone with a similar problem. The thread recommended installing some package that, when I went to apt-get it, I realized what the problem was.

Xorg-server had not installed.

Why did the upgrade even go through if it hadn't installed Xorg!? This made no sense. No sooner did I let Xorg install, then 'startx' worked and I was right into KDE. Which, I might add, had lost most of my preferences, such as appearance of windows and mouse behavior (I prefer double-click to single-click), and it seems to like hanging for a few seconds when I try to go to my auto-hiding menu on the right side of my screen.

Upon restarting it again, my network again failed to be configured for some reason, which is one of the exact problems I switched away from Fedora to get away from. KDE also made all my fonts a ton smaller and screwed with my desktop appearance again, which I have yet to bother trying to troubleshoot, as I think it's a more efficient use of my screen. The fonts also look much different (read--better) now, but for some reason, the numbers on KWifiManager's tray icon are extremely small and the top 1/3 or so is cut off.

I wish I could say I was pleased with Kubuntu Edgy, but all in all, my reaction is more of a "meh." I do like some things, like how XMMS doesn't scroll a whole page at a time when I scroll with my mouse wheel. I also like the newer kernel, which I'd been missing since I left Fedora, since 2.6.17 is the first kernel to have support for my FusionHDTV5-USB. I'm find it to be far easier to use on Kubuntu than it was in Fedora, mainly because Xine will actually install on Kubuntu, and not just complain abo