Ubuntu migrations to 8.10

3 November 2008

Ubuntu new release

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is out since a few days, so I updated a few machines that I had around.

Those machines are mainly friends, parents and family, since I don’t use Ubuntu.

This update seems to be pretty for many people on many forums…

Machines

I had 8 machines to migrate, 7 laptops, 4 of them were updating from Ubuntu 8.4 and the other had to migrate from 8.10.

Migrations

The migrations I did were always 7.10=>8.4=>8.10, because it seemed to be wiser.

Moreover, I tried both ways of using update-manager -d and edition of /etc/apt/sources.lists.

Results

8.4

The results of the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.4 were way better than when I did those updates when 8.4 was out.

I had one issue with one X.org with an outdated ATI driver, but it wasn’t difficult to fix if you are not afraid of non-GUI edition of files.

8.10

The results of this migration were, as expected, not good.

Only one laptop, the one with the less packages and without Compiz worked out of the box, using update-manager.

Update

The upgrading process went bad for 3 machines, where some packages didn’t want to get updated correctly, I had to use dpkg --force-all to fix those kind of issues.

Restart

The restart after upgrade were fast, and working more or less:

  • 3 laptops work perfectly
  • 3 of the remaining 5 have a broken X, and X taking 100% of proc or a faulting Compiz. One was ATI, the two others ones where nVidia.
  • 3 had a non-working network stack, wireless or ethernet.
  • 1 had no X, no wireless, no FireWire and a very slow startup;

Fixing

Most of the fixing where not difficult, but implied some of those:

  • X.org conffile edition
  • GNOME configuration files reset
  • Reinstallation of drivers
  • Deactivation of Compiz

And for the last and completly broken one, I reinstalled it from scratch.

Network Manager

On all of them, the new network manager is NOT able to connect to my FreeBox Wifi, that has been working for a long time now.

The issue is that this network manager doesn’t seem to understand that a WPA2 password can be a passphrase and not only a HexaKey. Whenever I use the passphrase and fails to connect, it shows me an hexadecimal password that is not what I filed in.

Conclusion

Well, as usual, I am not impressed by the Ubuntu upgrade. It is a very good and easy-to-use distribution, but upgrading Ubuntu distribution is way more difficult than it should be.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

8.10
Intrepid
Ubuntu
Upgrades

Comments

  1. On 20 May 20200, 4:59 by KillBush

    I’ve experience that if you upgrade Ubuntu too much it’ll start working slow…. Did 7.04->7.10->8.04->8.10, and it slowed to a crawl. Reinstalled - everything is quick again. Despite nvidia drivers….

  2. On 23 May 23230, 11:55 by JBK

    @Dave: those machines are not my machines, usually, so they don’t have many services, however, I had 0 problems with Apache and MySQL.

    For my servers, I still prefer Debian Stable…

  3. On 22 May 22220, 10:13 by Dave

    @Sam - KUbuntu is just Ubuntu with KDE as the default window manager. It will suffer from the same issues as the regular ubuntu distro.

    And FYI, if you want to have the functionality of KUbuntu in Ubuntu, type ‘apt-get install kde’ and voila.

    However, this thread is more about upgrading between releases of Ubuntu rather than the GUI that’s used.

    @JBK - what about non-GUI apps like apache, mysql, etc. They were okay or did you have to mess with them also?

  4. On 19 May 19190, 5:29 by materthron

    When I upgraded from 8.04 (which cumbersomely only worked with mesa dirvers) by means of update manager, my system was literally totally fucked up (couldn’t even boot any more).
    So the usual back-up old files to ext. hd, with Knoppix, get iso, burn iso and do a complete re-install cycle started once again.
    Unfortunatly, X kept freezing seconds after log-in; even with mesa. Fiddling and searching for 5h (! what a nice way to spend a sunday :( ) finally brought up this quirk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Quirks#AT… which made everything run seamlessly ever on.

    So, for me upgrading Ubuntu isn’t fun either ;-)

  5. On 10 May 10100, 3:53 by JBK

    @Sam: well, I did install KDE4 on the new ubuntu, but this doesn’t solve the migrations issues :D

  6. On 9 May 9090, 3:44 by rafa

    I agree.

  7. On 9 May 9090, 3:14 by Sam Gleske

    Have you ever tried Kubuntu? It’s useful as well and the new version (Kubuntu 8.10) takes advantage of the new KDE 4. I haven’t had much time to fiddle with it though (past using the live CD version) so I don’t know much about the new release.

    SAM
    sag47 on VLC forum and other Linux forums.

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