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!).

No probs for me.

[c0l0]

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.

Can't say I was too impressed with the upgrade

[also-rr]

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

[DrXym]

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.

Re:Network problem.

[Mulama]

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

Re:use gentoo and never do another dist upgrade ag

[livingdeadline]

Or, use another never-ending distro such as the usually not so unstable debian unstable and testing. Quite bleeding edge, and a personal desktop with either of these simply won't take as much time to keep running as gentoo.

Ubuntu upgrade went perfectly

[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 spending this morning removing MS Windows :p

Best upgrade ever imho and im not an advanced ubuntu user but a damned happy one.

Be realistic...

[denebola]

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.

Everythink worked fine here!

[yioan]

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 necessary. I know that when an operating system supports a functionality like the upgrade-manager it should work as it supposed to work, but when an upgrade is performed on the very first day, definitely, there will be unresolved issues because the product has not been tested exhaustively. That is, thousands of people downloaded the RC version but probably, hundreds of thousands have tried the latest version when it was released. Everyone is complaining that EDGY is not a major upgrade and it has nothing to show but here is what I found: - Now my IPOD works fine with Rhythmbox (songs can be deleted from and uploaded to the device) - Some bugs (that were affecting my every day work) in Evolution have been resolved - QT libraries have been updated. Try now to use keepassx (the open source password manager). Its interface is great. - I had some rendering issues with Google Earth. Every time I had to maximize and minimize it in order to work properly. Now everything is fine. - I have noticed that a lot of applications have been upgraded to their latest versions: Gaim, VLC player(0.86). - XEN is supposed to work more easily in edgy. I have not tried it yet, but it has been in included in apt-get and there is an article in the wiki. - Boot up time has been reduced. ... and probably other people will find out that there more and more optimizations.

A good upgrade

[JymmyZ]

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.

Re:I just did a dapper-edgy upgrade...

[pikine]

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 programs under /usr/bin, so /usr/X11R6/bin needs to become symbolic linked to /usr/bin. It turned out that I installed a snapshot of DRI drivers for my Mach 64 video card, which left a file /usr/X11R6/bin/xdriinfo, and dpkg tried to preserve that for me.

  Fix: run

  apt-get dist-upgrade; apt-get -f install

  until all packages are upgraded properly.

• As a result of the previous boo-boo, X drivers weren't automatically upgraded. The packages were renamed from xserver-xorg-driver-* to xserver-xorg-video-*, and for some reason apt-get didn't pick up these new names. So I wasn't able to start X after the next reboot.

  Fix: run apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-all

• A final problem had to do with usplash not being able to find a theme, so I watched in horror as Ubuntu booted in text mode. I switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu, but I upgraded the system back to Ubuntu. As a result, the usplash theme "update-alternatives" symbolic link pointed to a non-existent Kubuntu theme after the upgrade.

  Fix: run

  update-alternatives --set usplash-artwork.so /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-theme-ubuntu.so

  and after that, run

  update-initramfs -u

  to reflect the change in initrd for booting.

All of these commands to run must be performed as root, and I recommend switching to a single user mode before you do that.

Re:use gentoo and never do another dist upgrade ag

[nadamsieee]

Your text config files are still there (in /etc for example) with Ubuntu. Ubuntu doesn't 'force' you to use the gui.

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

[lilo_booter]

Try '#!/usr/bin/env bash' instead.

dist-upgrade problems

[JRiddell]

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

[prestwich]

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.

What are you doing that needs all the editing?

[BeeBeard]

I'm sorry, some of it isn't nonsense so much as you haven't made it clear exactly what you're doing with all the config file editing. I've been using Gentoo exclusively for years now, and I've found that just like most other flavors of Linux, once you've got everything the way you want it, that's it--no further maintenance or config file editing is required. It doesn't break or mysteriously stop working, which means I'm spending a lot more time using my computer instead of diagnosing software problems. That's why when you talk about "issues" in a general sense, I'm not really clear on what those might be.

It helps, of course, that I very seldom upgrade my hardware. If you're one of those people who buys a new Wacom tablet, scanner, printer, joystick, or whatever else every few weeks, then it would be unrealistic to think that hotplug or coldplug is going to keep you from doing the finessing that Gentoo often requires to get that stuff running. If not, and problems seem to crop up on a daily basis, then you could very well be doing something wrong ;) It wouldn't hurt to share your issues over on the Gentoo forums. Those people are extremely helpful and are bound to get you through any Gentoo quirks you may have run into. Cheers!

A few small but deal-breaking issues for me

[Chas]

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 seemed a bit more responsive than Dapper has on other machines of similar power.

However, I noticed that the Disk manager was missing from the admin menu. So I couldn't just dig into my NTFS partition. Bummer. Oh well, /etc/fstab mod here I come. Except that, even after a reboot, and double and triple checking that the entry in /etc/fstab are correct, Eft simply WOULD NOT mount my NTFS partition.

As I need to occasionally leech files from my Windows install, this kinda pissing in my cornflakes. And everything, and I mean EVERYTHING else works beautifully!

Tried to reinstall. Identical problem happened.

So, ripped it out again and went back to Dapper.

Okay, to be absoloutely FAIR about this, we WERE told that Edgy was just that. So it's not surprising that there are issues happening here. But people have been so ingrained with the "Gotta have the latest and greatest" idiocy that problems like this are inevitable.

Glad I'm Not The Only One!

[Trip Ericson]

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

Re:SWITCH TO OPEN SOLARIS TODAY!

[moronoxyd]

You don't need to switch distros with *buntu either. The different *buntus aren't really different distros, but rather the same distro with different DEs preinstalled. You can easily switch DE at any time, you just need to install the proper meta package (or whatever they call it), containing all necessary packages.

Re:interesting

[pdxsam]

If you upgraded a colo box to Edgy and are now complaining about it look in the mirror and see the fool.

From the beginning EDGY was setup for bleeding edge. Upstart is new technology.

Colo boxes that need up time should run Dapper until the 3rd iteration of the Edgy path, whatever that is named.

Now go out and reinstall DAPPER LTS (Long Term Support) and stop spamming us with this FUD.

Re:interesting

[vhogemann]

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:A few small but deal-breaking issues for me

[abhikhurana]

Install ntfs-3g. [ubuntu.com] Should solve your problem