Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala 1231
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?
All right, except for GRUB2 (Score:2, Informative)
Wifi works (Score:3, Informative)
I found that the Edimax WiFi card finally survives sleep mode without breaking.
My experience (Score:4, Informative)
Blank and flickering screens: No
Failure to recognize hard drives: No
Defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel: No
Failure to get encryption running:
Sorta, but only because my computer took a dive in the middle of the live upgrade. I had to remount / read-write from an emergency console and run apt-get again. Or actually it told me to run "dpkg --configure -a" to correct it. That installed most things, but I had to reboot into the normal recovery console and run last updates. Rebooted and...
Working flawlessly with full disk encryption and everything. No problems with anything so far, that's my anecdotal evidence at least.
netbook remix (Score:4, Informative)
A whole different story with Kubuntu (Score:1, Informative)
Actually for Kubuntu it's a whole different story, since the upgrade fixed some graphic issues with my Intel 82945G (GX) card. And the KDE 4.3.2 has a lots of improvements!!!
openSUSE 11.2 (Score:3, Informative)
openSUSE 11.2 : 8 days to go.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
I immediately found a very large irritant after upgrading. Previously, I had line-in set to play through to the speakers. There was a simple slider in sound preferences that existed back since at least 6.06. The same option exists under Windows. But suddenly, 9.10 removed this option. Line-in no longer plays through, and the option has been completely removed from the revamped (and somewhat disorganized) sound preference panels. I appreciate the effort to "modernize" the sound options like per-application tuning, but not at the cost of tossing simple, basic options that have existed since the invention of the sound card.
Also, regarding the bootup animations, they've changed for three or four consecutive upgrades now. I don't mind a refresher when appropriate, but "refreshing" every six months tells me that some priorities need some reordering.
My problems with 9.1 (Score:3, Informative)
Failure to recognize hard drives: No
Defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel: Yep. Does not set the new 2.6.30-14-generic as default. So I have to keep arrowing up in grub. I'll reset this myself.
I also am having a problem with X-Plane 9.40. I use to get 60FPS no problem. I get 20 now. Notably I upgraded to NVIDIA 190.42 as a result of the 180.29 issues. But, it doesn't matter on the NVIDIA version. Strangely I found a work around. If I go to Preferences/Rendering and exit out, about 1/3 of the time I get back to 60FPS. My guess is the OpenAL or pulseaudio as it's reinitialized.
Re:Karmic Koala - mostly Karmic (Score:4, Informative)
The new disk utility picked up the informed me that my laptop disk is in serious need of replacing, which is a nice thing to know before it fails. Overall, not as smooth an upgrade as Jaunty, but not bad.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Canonical is interested in rushing out bleeding edge versions of Ubuntu twice a year. Canonical is also interrested in stable, long term release versions, called LTS. Mod parent Troll.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm using Karmic on three computers, one fresh install and two upgrades from Jaunty.
All of them are good - one is Xubuntu on a lower-specced laptop and it feels quicker, both booting up and in use. The biggest problem was the current MythStream not working with V0.22 of MythTV.
Re:Professionalism (Score:3, Informative)
PC users upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 have run into a variety of hair pulling problems since last Thursday when Windows 7 launched. Complaints range from endless reboots to refusals by Windows to accept Microsoft's assigned product keys. As of Monday morning, Microsoft had answered about 2600 questions that poured into support forum regarding upgrades. At last count, around 1400 questions remained unanswered.
Oh wait... it does [pcworld.com] Not to pick favorites, I'd say both the latest Windows and the latest Ubuntu are less than perfect, but both will improve over time. I would also give Microsoft credit for having spent a lot more than Ubuntu did testing their latest release.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:3, Informative)
Guess you were lucky, I was less fortunate.
I've upgraded 2 machines from Jaunty to Karmic and both stopped rebooting/shutting down (they hang when trying to). But even besides that, loads of my settings got reset/removed. For example, I've lost all of my wifi profiles which is turning out to be quite a PITA.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:1, Informative)
35% success rate in running 9.10? That is not a good job.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Because my experiences match that of the vast majority of Ubuntu users.
Just as the people who are caught up in the "endless reboot" problem [computerworld.com] with Windows 7 are a tiny minority, so are those having trouble with Karmic.
Even your example fails since you are having difficulties but are willing to brush them off.
My "difficulties" are that a single plugin for a single program hasn't been updated yet. The author of the plugin has been notified and has provided a beta update [kabelfoon.nl]beta update. I have no doubt that I'll be seeing the release version in my update manager soon.
Re:Great (Score:1, Informative)
The options your looking for are, and have always been, part of `alsamixer`.
Re:Only Use LTS (Score:5, Informative)
...6 months releasing cycles are a joke. Just look at how long Windows 7 has been tested before release.
Then use Debian.
Flash (Score:3, Informative)
I installed this on my work and home PC with no obvious problems, and was really pleased with the responsiveness.
It wasn't until later that I realized that Flash no longer responds to mouse clicks. It makes YouTube and Pandora hard to use, and other Flash apps nearly impossible to use. A workaround was recommended, which unfortunately causes Firefox to crash on loading a Flash app.
~Ben
Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
On the very poll you linked to it says this -
*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here.
If you want to compare Karmic release with other releases based on this poll anyway here are the previous polls :
Numerous problems, all downgrades from Jaunty (Score:4, Informative)
Unlike previous releases where I jumped in fairly early in the beta process (beta 2 or 3), I waited to move to Karmic until the release. I also decided to do a clean install this time to ensure I wouldn't run into any upgrade issues.
Unfortunately, despite the supposed "papercut" fixes, this release seems far more prone to problems. On my Dell Latitude 620 (with Intel graphics, mind you):
About the only good thing I can say (which may also be attributed to the larger 500G drive I swapped in for the install), is that overall the system seems smoother and more responsive.
Other way around for me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Release cycles? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
I still don't use a new Ubuntu release for at least a few weeks though. There is always a flood of package upgrades for a few weeks after a release.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:5, Informative)
Vista had some really pathetic issues for *months* after it was released. I expect at least these issues will be cleared up pretty quickly. And as others have pointed out, this isn't an LTS release.
People are justified in trotting out their own experience because the summary asks for it.
For me KK is awesome, because I finally have accelerated graphics on my Dell Mini 9. I tried setting it up on jaunty a couple of times before but just assumed that my netbook didn't have the right chipset or enough graphics memory to run compiz. Now my netbook has all the benefits of the Ubuntu installation on my MBP (avant window navigator being one of my favourite things about it, 3D desktop cube and wibbly windows next), and more.
The only backwards step I've noticed so far is that the battery app in the system tray now just gives charge level as a percentage, with no time remaining or time to charge info. I don't think I had to install a custom app for that before. Strange.
My upgrade didn't go smoothly either (Score:3, Informative)
First thing I noticed was it didn't like the way I'd set up menu.lst. I have two disks mirrored with MD raid so I have 4 OS definitions per kernel - two for each disk (one multiuser, one single user). I don't trust Ubuntu to just update or replace, as it always wants to use root="UUID number" which is a pain in the ass if you ever restore from backup as that always changes with a new filesystem, so I just stick with - in my case - root=/dev/md2. I tried the experimental option to merge the old and new files - which didn't work, so I had to let it carry on with the upgrade while fixing it up in the background.
Next thing I hit was more of a problem. It balked doing a post install configure on eBox. The process went zombie and the upgrade just froze. I had to kill the parent python process to get dpkg to carry on with the rest of it, but discovered that at the end of the install and configure phase, dpkg had remembered the return errno from killing that child process and it decided to act on that by aborting the upgrade at that point - before the clean up phase. So the system is in an indeterminate state.
I rebooted, and it came up ok, but I then found I had three problems:
I ran out of time to play around with it so had to leave it like that. I think when I eventually get home again I'll just install from scratch and restore what I need to from backup. I can't really complain - after all it's not as if I've paid anything for it.
Re:Professionalism (Score:2, Informative)
Windows XP ... http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-30966-XP-boot-failure-after-using-windows-update.html [techspot.com]
Or Windows Vista ... http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/769242-failure-boot-right-after-windows.html [techguy.org]
Or Windows 7 ... http://windowsfixup.com/2009/04/latest-windows-7-updates-cause-bsod-fix/ [windowsfixup.com]
No problems here, on two computers (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Professionalism (Score:3, Informative)
But it is a surprise. Ubuntu so far has been (if not stable) then well tested and polished.
Grub 2 Sucks (Score:1, Informative)
Grub 2 seems to spend 4-5 seconds hammering disks while "Grub Loading..." is displayed. That sure eats into any boot time savings.
Also, the Grub 2 boot selection screen looks primitive, no other way to say it.
Finally, Grub 2 no longer uses our old friend /boot/grub/menu.lst, so one needs to research to find where the files are now, edit one of them, then run update-grub to ensure the change is propagated.
And then there was the screen flickering.
8 hours of bad road, and I haven't yet started using the damn thing.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:4, Informative)
Jumping to conclusions about their motivations? Maybe that persons experience was trotted out purely because the story summary itself asked for peoples experiences.
And here is mine: Two clean installs (no upgrades yet), and no apparent problems.
Re:In-place upgrade, or fresh install? (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately when I installed Ubuntu, I let it go with the recommended single /dev/hda1 partition that was 100%. Back in my old UNIX days, I normally would have had a small ~2GB /, ~4GB /usr, ~20GB /var, and allocated the rest under /home. But, being that everyone seemed to have been running full / partitions for desktops, I did that. WOOOPS!
I've thought about reinstalling everything. As you see above, I've always locked down my partitions for good reason. Reallocating a few OS partitions is no problem.
On a side note, I also had a custom 2.6.28 kernel as I was working on developing a USB driver for the NVIDIA ESA device support (which is really just HID 1.1, but, Linux is not HID 1.08 compliant). Getting closer, but, I'm really having to reimplement HID 1.11 so I'm trying to decide if I should implement it as a USB replacement for the kernel or as a HIDDEV/RAW type module.
Troubles... yes... Switching back to Windows.. Hell no! (I booted into my old Vista drive to upgrade my iPhone to 3.0... that took 30 minutes to boot and open ITunes! Screw that!)
Re:Great (Score:3, Informative)
I ran into the same class of sound issues, in my case the primary one was trouble getting all of the output in the right mode. The sound card was convinced that the regular audio output was actually the coax one, and it was hard to figure out how to tell it otherwise (even though the problem and the solution were quite obvious). Just like old times, when everything broke after merging PulseAudio.
I was eventually able to dig into the sound issues using tools like alsamixer and manually tweaking what driver I was using to get things working again on the sacrificial test system. The contortions required made the new setup seemed really fragile, and I'm not sure exactly what fixed the issue. That means I might have to do this again after some future system update. While the Jaunty Sound Preferences panel was never elegant, it did at least work most of the time. As you point out, it looks like all of the GUI-based tools you used to be able to do troubleshooting and easily try alternative configs with are either gone or not in an obvious place anymore in Karmic. Given how problematic Linux sound has been over the years, it takes a very peculiar form of arrogance to presume it's finally fixed now all of the sudden, and therefore it's fine to seriously deprecate alternatives that (while not the preferred approach) were sometimes the only thing that did work in earlier releases.
Since there were some other really annoying bits in this release (the awful and so ubiquitous it's difficult to turn off new Notify OSD comes to mind), so far it looks like I'll be skipping this release. I skipped 7.10, 8.04, and the first few months of 8.10 due to quality control issues too, so this isn't that surprising. Ubuntu may put out a new release every six months, but I only seem to find one worth upgrading to every two years anyway. Seems pretty clear to me the 6-month release cycle is faster than Canonical and the community can really deliver stable software in. And that's regardless of LTS tagging, 8.04 was the worst of the bunch and its backported bug fixes were minimal for the problems I ran into; all the awful bugs were marked "fixed in Intrepid" and that was the end of it. I feel lucky that the LTS 9.04 release is the good one now, am hoping things work out similarly to how 7.04 kept me going for a long time before I needed to update. Of course, audio problems with Skype are still looming...
Re:I run it on a Macbook (Score:2, Informative)
I have never once gotten the GUI system update tools to work properly.
Use the CLI version like the Omnissiah intended.
1) Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed:
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
2) Launch the upgrade tool:
sudo do-release-upgrade
3) Follow the on-screen instructions.
Re:Professionalism (Score:3, Informative)
"stable" (Score:3, Informative)
Why not test things and then update, instead of arbitrarily picking a version and declaring it to be stable?
"Stable" means it doesn't change. It doesn't mean it works perfectly. If you update something, it's not stable.
Re:Release cycles? (Score:3, Informative)
Just in case you didn't see the first reply, I'll echo it:
*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here.
I haven't upgraded yet, but, seriously, if it works painlessly, I'm unlikely to look for a poll to post that information in. I'll only go looking to find information if it's NOT painless.
Register Bloodied by Lack of Research (Score:5, Informative)
Typically, I read and respect The Register. They usually run intriguing technology articles that make me think. I'm quite disappointed with today's carelessly researched piece, specifically, the paragraphs regarding eCryptfs.
Lack of automation? In Ubuntu 9.10, encrypting your home directory is a matter of selecting a check box in the installer: That's it. 9.04 Encrypted Home upgrading users simply run update-manager and upgrade all packages to 9.10. Their home directory encryption is not affected by this.
The author of this article found one post in the Ubuntu Forums poorly articulating an issue with home directory encryption and suddenly Ubuntu 9.10 users are getting "bloodied" by encryption in Ubuntu? Seriously?
I expect better journalism from The Register...
Re:Release cycles? (Score:4, Informative)
The release behind shipping the LTS with Firefox 3.0b4 was simply that Firefox 2 would not have been maintainable for the next five years. It was decided that as soon as firefox 3.0 final was released, it would be placed both in the updates and security tree. If your running an up to date Hardy system, you have the latest version of firefox 3.
Re:X.10 versions are never 100%... (Score:3, Informative)
I think people tend to forget that the X.10 versions of Ubuntu are considered to be less stable than the X.04 versions. They're meant to be the version before the next increment to the major (e.g. 9.10 to 10.04) number and it's expected that there will be kinks to iron out.
Since when is X in X.Y Ubuntu versioning scheme a "major number"? Last I checked, X is just year number, and Y is month; and the only stability difference is between LTS and non-LTS releases (and not every .04 release is LTS).
My Experience (Score:4, Informative)
Whas [sic] has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?
The Good:
The Bad:
I would have to say that in my experience with Karmic, the pros greatly outweighed the cons. I'll live major increases in performance at the cost of minor fixable annoyances!
Of course, I did an upgrade from 9.04 so I haven't taken the plunge to GRUB 2 or EXT4. Those two things are still kinda young (and bold decisions for Canonical to commit to production) so perhaps they're contributing factors to the problems that most people are experiencing?
Re:Professionalism (Score:2, Informative)
Actually when 9.04 came out I bought 20 CD's from them to give to people. I'm a little hesitant this time given the black screen of boot death some people have gotten. I myself have gotten this screen from a USB installer I made. It wasn't until the distro update came over the updater that I did upgrade and that worked fine.
I would love to be able to go and buy 20 more CDs from them and give those to people. I'm putting that off for now till things settle down.
Re:No issues (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I switched shortly before the RC (Score:4, Informative)
Occasional pop sounds from the speakers, but audio is working fine.
In
comment out
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
(last line).
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1311262&highlight=popping+sounds
HP laptop video pain (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great (Score:1, Informative)
Yeah, issues like your volume thing are due to GNOME, not Ubuntu. Those GNOME people are some crazy fuckers. They keep removing stuff that people use.
The one that got me is they changed the Login administration panel and removed options like being able to turn off that damn bongo sound that plays when gdm starts (at the login screen). So now it's impossible to turn off without some serious hacking (I killed it by physically removing the sound file). Why they removed this, I have no idea. Those settings aren't typically messed with my your average folk unless they have some specific reason to (like disabling the stupid sounds). Dumbing down the administration panels makes no sense because they aren't typically used by common folk anyway and when they actually do need to do something they will find that's it's really, really much harder than it needs to be.
Default configuration issues (Score:2, Informative)
Honestly, I like a lot of the stuff they're doing in Ubuntu, however having JUST set up a complete novice Linux user with Koala and watched the things they had an issue with:
1. The SMB mounting tool is nice, except it doesn't show shares in Gnome file dialogs! The connection it makes is not persistent. Nor is SMBFS installed by default. I had to install smbfs then go in and set up everything manually in fstab, which is ridiculous for a distro not to have covered in a cleaner way. That's not hard for me but come on!
2. Mime types are not properly set up in firefox. With a totally fresh install, a .doc downloaded from the web cannot be opened directly, even though it's listed as the type handler... She ended up going to the containing folder and opening it through the file browser, again this is pretty bad not to have working.
3. Sound settings are not properly saved by the mixer on reboot. In addition though pulse is installed by default it doesn't work nearly as well the way it is configured by default as in some other distributions I've used. I've had to sit down and fix various sound issues several times.
There are probably more things I'm forgetting as well, or that she has not seen fit to bother me with...
On the plus side, the regressions in 9.04 with full screen flash and some types of webcams seem to have been fixed (no more LD_PRELOAD shortcuts). That's positive.
Ultimately, the only thing at this point that is really keeping me considering Ubuntu/Kubuntu over SuSE is apt. YaST is pretty good, but apt is better and the package coverage is also better. I really dislike Canonical's insistence on making you jump through hoops to use "non free" software. I am very pro-free-software, however if anyone involved with high level decisions at Canonical is reading this right now, give me a freaking button I can click during the installation that says "I am a big kid, I can make my own choices regarding free/non free software, I'm not interested in making a big philosophical statement with this computer, please include non-free software in my basic installation".
9.10 is most working great (Score:3, Informative)
I find 9.10 is working faster than 9.04. It boots faster and the interface is a little faster. The only issue I have is wxmaxima crashes constantly. I can't even do a sqrt(4); without crashing. I'm hoping patches will take care of everything soon.
Slow Boot Up (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bad statistics - GIGO (Score:2, Informative)
As for my story, I was running 9.10 since alpha, and it went quite nicely.. Minor pulseaudio glitches that were solved over time and so on. At work and on my laptop, I've upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic when offered to do so by the update manager, and it went nicely too. No problem here, not even a dependency issue, it really went fine, and 2.6.31 is really nice to my setups
About all this issue.. I can't help but think it's more a PR prank than a real spotted issue.. The bugtracker doesn't tell that "that many" users are impacted, and also, that it may be more due to a ATI-card weirdness.. Heh. Not ubuntu's fault in the end, even if they could have worked around it..
Re:Release cycles? (Score:2, Informative)
> anything other than bleeding edge beta quality releases
Ubuntu is what it is because of the circumstances of its birth.
At the time, Debian stable had not been meaningfully updated in, approximately, forever. The cool kids were trying out Linux 2.6, and meanwhile Debian stable offered you the choice of the "new and experimental" Linux 2.2, or the tried and true Linux 2.0. What? Linux 2.4? We can't put that in stable, it's only six years old!
Ubuntu, or at least a large part of its popularity, was born out of frustration with this situation. The official Debian line at the time was that "stable" means "doesn't change often", but people were starting to think a new version would not come out *ever*. A lot of people started playing around with testing and/or unstable, but those are really a bit *too* bleeding-edge for most purposes.
Something intermediate was needed, something safer and saner than running off the testing repository (an actual *release*, in other words), but built out of software released in the current decade. Warty was built out of that would eventually become Sarge, but it was built as an actual *release*. This was sorely needed at the time, so it instantly became popular, and the rest is history.
So if you think Ubuntu is less stable than Debian stable,
Of course, Debian releases have been coming out a little more frequently since sarge. Etch for instance came out practically overnight, by Debian standards. So the disadvantages of using Debian stable are somewhat less now. But Ubuntu remains an intermediate distribution, more current than Debian stable but an actual stable release unlike Debian testing. That's its niche. That's its role. And the next time a Debian release takes half as long to come out as sarge did, I'll be very glad Ubuntu is around as an option.