Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare" 529

Posted by kdawson from the you-have-been-warned dept.
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!).
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare" More

Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare"

Comments Filter:

  • Network problem. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MartinG ( 52587 )
    I've done a fresh install of edgy on my laptop and the network device does not get set up. Previously with dapper it was fine. I now have to do "sudo dhclient eth0" manually. I can't really complain though, since I haven't even raised it as a bug yet.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Mulama ( 1019786 )
      I have a simple HOWTO for your problem, http://counting.xf.cz/id2964.html [counting.xf.cz]

    • interesting (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ArbitraryConstant ( 763964 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @08:29AM (#16631428) Homepage
      My network ports got flipped around (eth1 and eth0 got mapped onto different hardware).

      IMO, you shouldn't have to submit a bug to be able to complain. Writing a good bug report is a fair amount of work, and if you're expected to do it whenever the OS whenever the OS has issues, then that OS is suddenly a lot of extra work to use.
    • I did a fresh install, and I had all kinds of interesting problems with X. Not Ubuntu's fault, it's mostly my hardware.

      I have a laptop. To make a long story short, I had to configure X to ignore what the hardware told it, and set the primary display to read as a CRT (and put in the proper HSync and VSync rates), with no secondary. (The actual layout was the laptop panel on primary, crt on secondary... but the hardware wouldn't play nice that way.

      I even had to go as far as disabling DDC.

      Oh, then I had to add
  • http://blog.hulboj.org/2006/10/windows_bad_linux_b ad.html [hulboj.org]

    Even had to use the force (dpkg)...

  • No probs for me. (Score:4, Informative)

    by c0l0 ( 826165 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:10AM (#16630354) Homepage
    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.
    • ... since upgrading by much the same means as you describe, Firefox won't play Flash content anymore. Works fine in Konqueror. Something to do with going to FF 2.0, I suppose. I'll puzzle it out soon enough, but it's hardly a show-stopper.
    • Okay, brand new craptop (Dell Latitude 120L with a 1GB memory upgrade). WinXP Pro. A gig of RAM. All the hardware on it is supported by both Drake and Eft.

      The LiveCD looks just fine. Nearly identical to the Drake LiveCD.

      The installer worked beautifully, as always. And you can now resize your NTFS partitions quite easily with the partitioner.

      Rebooted into the full install and started poking around.

      Got all my regular software in. Automatix took care of the rest of the necessities.

      On the whole, Eft seeme
    • After all, most of them don't realize that key upgrades in Linux land can be as simple as

      via apt (`sed -i "s/dapper/edgy/" /etc/apt/sources.list && apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`)

      All of this talk about average desktop users finding such things in some way mysterious or intimidating is nonsense. My grandma uses more complex command lines in her gingerbread recipe.
  • And it went horribly wrong. I have an ATI card with the ATI driver installed via easyubuntu. After the upgrade, X just died saying the ati driver failed to start. My wireless wasn't working, either, so I couldn't get on google via lynx to research it. I ended up reinstalling dapper from CD, then doing the edgy upgrade straight away, and it was fine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0xB00F ( 655017 )

      Initially I had a slight problem with my ATI card not being able to run with hardware accelerated 3D. But after searching the Ubuntu Forums, I got it working.

      I have never had to do a clean install on my machine ever. I have been running Ubuntu since the first release and I have been doing a dist-upgrade to keep up with every major release. The upgrade from Dapper to Edgy was even better as I did it through the Update Manager GUI for the first time and it worked like a charm.

      What are the odds that you inst

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by pikine ( 771084 )

        What are the odds that you installed the drivers from ATI and not used the Ubuntu .deb packages for your ATI drivers? I would also guess that you have a wireless card and you did some fiddling around with it to get it to work?

        I can affirm this. Last night I spent a few hours wondering what went wrong with the Dapper to Edgy upgrade. They both had to do with some peculiarity of my system:

        • GUI upgrade failed halfway because xorg-common complained that /usr/X11R6/bin is not empty. Edgy now installs all X

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by arodland ( 127775 )
      So what you're saying is "I installed some important drivers through an unsupported tool that works in a stupid way so that it can be called 'easy', and then when the official tool failed to upgrade this manually-installed software of which it was unaware, causing problems, I was pissed" ?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Gossi ( 731861 )
        Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. And I'm serious. Frankly, I don't care that I did something in an unsupported method (ie installing a bloody graphics driver). All I wanted was to upgrade Ubuntu from a version released 4 months ago to the current version. If Windows died every time a service pack was applied, you would probably be laughing your arses off at Microsoft.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Svartalf ( 2997 )
          Just exactly what part of "unsupported" did you not understand? This is not analogous to a XP Service Pack
          installation breaking things as you put it. It's analogous to a service pack breaking all the registry
          hacks you've done to make Home act like Professional and not report back home. What you did was unsupported
          and it doesn't matter whether it's Windows, MacOS, Linux, or any other OS you choose to name. Unsupported means
          precisely that- and if it breaks on you you get both pieces.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Gossi ( 731861 )
            Yeah, but when you install a random application in Windows from a 3rd party vendor, it's unsupported. I expect said random application or driver to keep working in that version of Windows - they usually do. If I upgrade to Vista? Sure, it could break. Just to put this into perspective again - the version of Ubuntu I was running was 4 months old. I know what unsupported means in the Linux world. Random computer user at home does not care. They want their OS to work 4 months later. If it breaks 4 mont
        • You're missing the point a little bit. Sure, you should feel free to go outside the system to install a video driver if you feel like it. But if something breaks because the system didn't know about the change, this is now your fault. And if you need to upgrade something to keep it in sync with the rest of the system, you're responsible for doing the legwork. Although since in this case it should have been possible to install the drivers in a way that wouldn't break without warning, an equal share of the bl

  • It's been out, what, three days? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Plug ( 14127 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:12AM (#16630360) Homepage
    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.
    • ...but, but linux distros age like bread. It's best on the first day, okay on the second. And by the third, I want a new loaf!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Blakey Rat ( 99501 )
      I agree with your last paragraph more than anything I've read in this thread. Open source products, in general, have terrible or non-existent QA and that needs to change before it's more than a hobby and server OS. From my own experience attempting to put in bugs, it seems to me that if you put in a bug you're expected to write the code to resolve it as well. If you're not able to write the code, your bug will invariably be forgotten (and eventually marked as 'closed' when the next version is released, even

      • Yes :) (Score:3, Insightful)

        by steve_l ( 109732 )
        As someone who works on Apache ant, yes, we like bugreps that are replicable, and prefer patches with tests.

        At the same time, we try and test our stuff, internally and externally. But the moment an x.0 release ships, we still get lots of bugreps. And you know why that is? Because when the x.0 release ships, a lot more people grab the app and use it. And unlike beta testers, these are not experienced developers. They are people who (in the Java context) dont know that the CLASSPATH env variable is a recipie

  • It's called Edgy for a reason... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lixee ( 863589 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:13AM (#16630370)
    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!
  • Since when has there ever been any expectation of anything but the most vanilla install of any Linux distro been expected to go correctly? The key to handling these things is a careful partitioning of file systems such that data is untouched by upgrade processes and a strong enough understanding of how the necessary services/programs are configured and interact with other core applications. If you find that you have a neither of these requirements handled it should be common knowledge that your experience w

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SpinyNorman ( 33776 )
      I agree with careful partitioning, but I do it in a fairly crass way... I just have one partition for "/home" (ext3), one for swap, and then a bunch of partitions for "/" of each each distro/release I want to install. I always do fresh installs to a new partition - never upgrades.

      This approach is a compromise - your old and new installs are guaranteed to work (as much as any new install is!) since there's no sharing of any system files, but you do then have to reinstall anything outside of /home after a new

  • Can't say I was too impressed with the upgrade (Score:4, Informative)

    by also-rr ( 980579 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:15AM (#16630384) Homepage
    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 :)
  • Upgrading from Kubuntu dapper using s/dapper/edgy/g

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aj50 ( 789101 )
      Lucky for you, I did the same, the upgrade failed on dpkg-multicd saying it was trying to overwrite a man page which was in dpkg-dev. Then it just stopped, without installing the rest of the packages or configuring anything. Not realizing the error I restarted, only to be unable to boot.

      Now I've got it sorted out and am running AIGLX with Beryl and bits of XFCE and it's great!

  • I've only had a few problems when I upgraded:

    The update gave up during the installation so I had to run apt-get dist-upgrade again.

    A few packages were held back, namely Amarok, mplayer and python-*

    I lost direct rendering on my ATI card. I fixed this though by adding

    Section "Extensions"
    Option "Composite" "0"
    EndSection

    To my xorg.conf and rebooting

    On the plus side, I now have Firefox 2 (which does crash, but that's the fault of the extensions I run) and
    • A few packages were held back, namely Amarok, mplayer and python-*

      Just found out that apt-get install will install them for you.

  • Worked for me (Score:4, Informative)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:18AM (#16630406)
    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.
    • The upgrade did not, however, work perfectly for me. There were X crashes each time I logged on, and everything was incredibly slow to load. I was only able to resolve the problems by getting an even techier friend to change my X configuration, and remove several problematic programs. This was nothing to do with server timeouts. This was to do with a lack of testing at the beta release stage. If Linux is ever going to make it to the mainstream, we need to stop such glaring omissions making it into release
    • The guy who provided details had his installation fail because he had modified his system in non-standard ways. If he's doing that, he should also be capable of upgrading himself, otherwise, he should have stayed with what he had working, or consulted someone before upgrading, or even paid an expert to help him upgrade.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        My system was slightly modified too - I have an NVidia driver for X. I actually forgot all about this but it worked at the end so I'm happy.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ChrisJones ( 23624 )
        Unfortunately there are a lot of HOWTOs and Guides people have written for Ubuntu without really knowing what they are doing, so some highly crackful customisations are out there, as well as poorly produced and unmaintained apt repositories for later versions of various packages. ubuntuguide.org is a perfect example of how not to change things on an Ubuntu install ;)
    • I upgraded after reading the /. article and would estimate average download speed at 25KB/Sec, which is less then 10% of what I usually achieve.

      Mind you, I'm not complaining. I just let the upgrade run well into the night and after declining a couple of replaced initialisation files everything went absolutely flawlessly.

      Kudos to the Ubunut team from my perspective.

  • I must have really lucked out. Usually with linux and me, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. However, I've upgraded my desktop workstation and my development server (both running ubuntu, very different setups though) and both have been seamless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by afd8856 ( 700296 )
      I have about the same experience. I have upgraded several Dappers to Edgy and didn't had too much troubles. Actually, upgrading a straight Dapper to Edgy has been very very error-free, for me at least. The only problems I had were with my main 2 workstations, which had a lot of extra packages installed and were somehow conflicting. In this cases, the main installer (started with update-manager -c -d) quit, but I could run apt-get dist-upgrade from the console, see what the problem packages were, remove them

  • Don't worry! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:22AM (#16630428) Homepage
    The problems will all be fixed on Patch Tuesday.

  • Worked for me and why it happened... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drgonzo59 ( 747139 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:33AM (#16630480)
    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.

    • One has to account for X possible previous versions (Dapper, Hoary, Breezy...

      Ubuntu doesn't officially support upgrading from anything other than the immediately prior release (in this case Dapper) - if you want to upgrade from older versions then you're meant to do a sequence of upgrades (i.e. one version at a time).

  • Yup (Score:2)

    by tgd ( 2822 )
    Yesterday I attempted to upgrade my laptop from Dapper to Edgy.

    Lets just say its good its a dual boot, and I'm posting from Windows.

    The upgrade program kept fighting with the system, and I'm left unable to use X-windows realiably (it crashes randomly), wireless no longer works (so I can't update any packages or search the web for hints as to what went wrong).

    Its going to take me hours to fix everything, I'm guessing. Its probably going to be faster to wipe it out and reinstall from scratch. They definitely

  • The change no-one mentioned: bash-dash (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kestasjk ( 933987 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:47AM (#16630564) Homepage
    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.

  • Please keep in mind... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by robzon ( 981455 )
    ... that this was not supposed to be production-ready release.

    It had a very short development cycle (only 4 months, because of dapper's delay).
    It was supposed to be 'edgy' and an unstable entry point for future next-gen Ubuntu releases.
    It's not even available in Shipit!
    Dapper is recommended for a casual user, Edgy is for a little more advanced users, who know what to do when something breaks.

    So while your opinions are very welcome, don't blame Ubuntu guys for screwing up the distro. It's just the way it was
  • Huh, with all these troubles of FF and Ubuntu (and whatnot), I'm really curious how my anticipated apt-get upgrade of Sarge will do (in December, so I hope !) ?
    Please, Debian-guys, don't leave me standing in a similar cold then !

    One goodie, though: It seems we on the *nix side of the world will be done by end of this year (yes, OpenBSD 4.0 will be out in 3 days), and I'll hopefully have an updated Festive Season and a clean New Year - while our friends on W32 will probably have to enjoy a disruptive 2007 ..
  • Well, duh, of course it's problematic if you use a server with RAID and remotely upgrade from a long term support to an edgy distribution (6.06 was supposed to be rock stable, and edgy to be a little unstable and, um... edgy, remember?)
    On the other hand, it's easy for me to say that - I did a clean install...
    All in all, edgy disappointed me - nothing REALLY new, and now this article about updgrades going wild...
  • First please don't write confusing articles by using negatives like that. eg: Updates are bad, but not in linux., but not in edgy.

    The update worked for me. Fine. And my mum pulled the plug on my computer half way through. I had a similar situation updating Fedora from CD, when half the discs were corrupt. Updating linux is piss easy - thank you package managers - they're only older than me. Fedora: yum for rpm. Debian: apt for dpkg. If you've succeeded in installing something, an update is no harder. man ap
  • Edgy Eft is full of new and beta packages, and it has had half the release cycle of most ubuntu versions. Because of this, I'm amazed that it's working as well as it is. If people want stability,
    stick with Dapper! You'll save yourself headaches. There's a reason why they have LTS on Dapper.

  • Ubuntu upgrade went perfectly (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    all i can say is i had ubuntu 6.06 + compiz + xgl and it all worked perfectly. if it wasnt for the fact wine wouldnt play wow id deinstall windows.

    i then did the update from System - Admin - update manager and hey presto (3hrs later of downloads) no buttons to press and only had to choose to keep my config files intact. And it is all working. boots faster than ever. XGL and compiz effects all in tact AND ... here is the kicker .. World of Warcraft now works AND a few other games that didnt before. im spendi

  • Be realistic... (Score:2, Informative)

    by denebola ( 868771 )
    Once you open your sources.list up to include universe and multiverse, all upgrade bets are off. How can you possibly expect the ubuntu team to consider every unknown eventuality.
    • Did just that, must've been lucky. Just changed all instances of dapper to edgy. The dist-upgrade was slow last night (~30 KB/s) and had two or three package downloads time out, but it got there eventually.

      The next round of upgrades replaced sysvinit with Upstart, reducing boot time considerably. I heard it wouldn't... but it's similar to XP now, rather than several times longer. Apps also seem to start faster; KDE apps anyway -- but I might be imagining that. (I'd sacrifice all of that for working ACPI
  • In my experience with debian, upgrading between releases were mostly flawless.

    I've did it from potato to woody, from woody to sarge, from sarge to etch, from woody to sid and a lot of other combinations...

    It took three steps: 1. changing the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list 2. apt-get update 3. apt-get dist-upgrade

    Then of course, sid is the "perpetual fresh" or "cutting edge" release, so you don't tend to upgrade from there. I'm sure there are lots of breakages in sid, but what I had noticed in r
  • I have an old Dell c640 laptop and everything works fine after the latest upgrade, from dapper to edgy. The same happened when I upgraded from breezy to dapper. I don't know, but maybe I was lucky. What people should understand is that upgrading the whole operating system is not an easy case. The fact that something probably will go wrong must be expected. It is like resizing your partitions, but you have not kept any backups. If you have a production quality system an upgrade is realized only when it is ne
  • because I've upgraded 2 machines from dapper to edgy and it's been the smoothest upgrade I've *ever* done.
  • I think anyone who actually installed it at all without having to make some compromises to their intended settings is pretty lucky. For example, the partitioner gparted simply refused to recognise the ext3 partition that I planned to freshly install to. So I had to forgo indexing when I had to install to an ext2 partition. Yes, WTF indeed. Then fstab forced me to mount other partitions through the terminal, as I didn't want then to automount my porno... um, windows partitions, something that was as easy as

  • A good upgrade (Score:2, Informative)

    by JymmyZ ( 655273 )
    I did an upgrade to Edgy from Dapper and it seemed to go almost flawlessly, except for a slow dl rate that required a few attempts at getting all the packages. When I tried upgrading the video driver (nvidia 7950) so I could use Compiz and Beryl and that was a mess. I still don't have surround and for some reason Eclipse doesn't work. I haven't had time to figure out why and I don't need it at the moment but I'm still wondering why it's broken.
  • This could be the singular most harmful thing to open source that has happened all year. As many of you know, Ubuntu has been a solid distribution for new Linux users who are trying to ween themselves off of Windows. These people stopped using Windows for a variety of reasons: It crashed a lot, nothing seemed to work reliably, uninstalling software was dodgy, etc. To have a minor Ubuntu upgrade manifest the same problems they thought they were leaving behind is to suggest to them "Why don't you just run
  • I've dist-upgrated from Ubuntu 5.10 to 6.06 and it was very good.

    Now I've upgrated to 6.10 and I'm having a hell of problems:
    • Brazilian ABNT2 keyboard just dosen't work on KDE, needed to include export QT_IM_MODULE=simple on /etc/X11/Xsession. It's easy, AFTER 3 hours looking in phoruns and kubuntu bugzilla :-P
    • Firefox just keep crashing, after tests, I found the problem was the flash plugin Ubuntu ships
    • Brazilian ABNT2 keyboard is missing some important (as /) keys on console. This is a well know bug on Debia
  • I'm doing the first upgrade of three right now... so far only a few little minor issue's that were sorted pretty quick.
    The biggest issue was the DNS breakage of contribs.org.
    I have faith.. it seems ok so far.
  • your /home is SUPPOSED to be a different partition. I can fresh install all day long and never ever touch my user files and important data. That is how I did the last 4 Ubuntu upgrades. erase ubuntu, install new, login and magically all my stuff is still there, even my desktop layout, background image and mozilla bookmarks.

    Are people doing silly things and installing to a single partition again??
    • The problem is that you might not know how much space to allocate for /home and / -- especially if you don't have some huge drive. It's always been a problem for me, from the beginning of my time with GNU/Linux (1996). The last thing you want is to try to install some new package and find out you have no space on your / partition left. This is especially confusing for new users who don't understand that they have lots of space in the /home partition but none in /.

      That's why we're talking about whether some
  • Once again I renew my call for the editors to get with the program and use an Ubuntu icon [ubuntu.com] rather than a Debian icon when posting stories about Ubuntu. Yes, Ubuntu is derived from Debian, but it is arguably the most popular GNU/Linux distro on the desktop. I would think this warrants its own icon.

  • dist-upgrade problems (Score:4, Informative)

    by JRiddell ( 216337 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @08:09AM (#16631324) Homepage
    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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by prestwich ( 123353 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @08:17AM (#16631356) Homepage
    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.
  • Look people, you got great software for free.. so you have upgrade problems, big deal.

    Just be glad you didnt pay 300 bucks for the 'upgrade' that eats your system. Just reinstall like it was suggested and be happy.

    Geesh.

  • Rethink (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FishandChips ( 695645 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @08:29AM (#16631434) Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) *

      And if your computer is a little flaky, and rebooting doesn't fix it, you should wipe the drive and reinstall. Thank you, Bill.

      I'm typing this on Debian sid. I originally installed slink on my Thinkpad 750, then upgraded to potato, then copied the image to my Thinkpad 600E, then upgraded to woody, then copied the image to my Thinkpad T21, then upgraded to sarge when it was testing, then to sid, which I have upgraded weekly ever since. Oh, and the image got copied to my Thinkpad T40 a couple years ago,

  • I upgraded a couple of boxes and it went like a charm.

  • Glad I'm Not The Only One! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Trip Ericson ( 864747 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @08:39AM (#16631508) Homepage
    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

  • cant even get the iso install CD to fully boot (!)
    it gets to the point where it starts to load the linux kernal, and then...

    [55.018231] unable to locate RSDP (invalid compressed format (err=2)
    [55.028758] Kernal panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount roof fs on unknown-block(1,)

    and it insists on making the 1024x768 LCD screen a 800x600 screen by default
    unless i manually hack the xorg.conf file (ugh) -- a normal user would NEVER
    know how to do that. oh, and thinkpad 770 sound never worked... :-\

    guess its ba
  • After upgrading:

    - Firefox crashed on Flash, Edgy clobbered xorg.conf
    - No more SMP support for my Core Duo. No, the generic kernel doesn't see the second core, I've tried all the online work-arounds
    - Sound support is flaky, after a reboot it's about 50% chance there is any sound at all
    - It is now completely random which media application can play a media file.

    I'm going back to Dapper, I'll be back for 7.04 or 7.10 (Grotty Gofer)

Slashdot Top Deals

Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!

Close