Ubuntu upgrade hosed me again

[joetekubi]

When will I ever learn? Many, many times I've had problems with Ubuntu upgrades, and I always figure that it's temporary, and they have really solved it this time.

I have a HP i5 laptop that was running 10.04, so I figured it was time to upgrade. Bumped it to 10.10 - wouldn't run X, somehow mysteriously lost my original X config file, and couldn't figure out my video. A manual edit of xorg.conf file and I was back running.

So, once again, I bumped to 11.04. It's been out a few months, so the bugs must be worked out, right? Upgrade went smoothly (they always do) until the reboot. Grub menu comes up, but no text console and no X. After a bit of Googling, I find the magic, I need "acpi=off" on the kernel boot line. So now I'm back running, except my laptop runs at 90C even when idle and hangs on a shutdown.

I'm going to repartion, and never do another in-place, one-way upgrade again. Always have a stable OS partition, and another one to try out the new versions.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I've given up on Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros for good after this past week. I had a hard drive failure and instead of reinstalling Mandriva (since they forked to Mageia), I gave Mint a chance.

Everything seemed to work better than the last time I tried Ubuntu (onboard audio worked for a change), but the overall performance was still sluggish. Even after ignoring the sluggishness, I started getting frequent hangups, networking problems, and even had issues logging back in after the screensaver locked. That was the last straw, and I mulled over going with Fedora, Debian, Mageia, or even back to Mandriva.

I settled on Debian despite Ubuntu's relationship, and can say I am quite pleased with the performance of Debian right now. There is no sluggishness, no issues logging back in, and no hangups. The only issues I've had were with Nvidia's non-free driver (dkms failed when I installed a newer kernel from backports) and a Ralink wireless adapter (non-free driver also), but those are working fine after a manual install.

Never again will I consider using Ubuntu or a derivative. Never.

 

[lxskllr]

I've stuck with Ubuntu LTS releases for awhile now, and I've had 2 flawless upgrades going from LTS-LTS. That said, next year when I'm due to upgrade my LTS release, I'll likely switch to Debian. For a long time Ubuntu was pretty much what I wanted, out of the box. With all the recent changes, that's no longer the case. If I'm gonna be changing a bunch of crap after installing, I'd just as soon go to the core, and change Debian. So far, it's looking like Sid, and the Xfce desktop is what I'll be using. It requires a little more care updating, but the system will always be new, without traumatic major updates.

 

[H54]

Upgrades never seem to work correctly. I've always clean installed with no problems.

However, like lxskllr, Ubuntu in its present form (11.04 + Unity) is no longer what I want. For my main work machine (laptop), I've stayed on 10.10 since there were so many regressions and the whole kernel power issues. Unless Unity's functionality and customisability are greatly expanded in 11.10, I'm done with Ubuntu for good.

 

[joetekubi]

Thanks for the feedback and support, guys!
I agree, Unity is a big move in the wrong direction.

 

[Nothinman]

I have no idea how Ubuntu manages to screw their upgrades so badly with every release, I've been running Debian sid for as long as I can remember and have had very few issues. Although they're usually much smaller upgrades since it's a rolling distro that I update several times a week. The only time I seem to hit one is when a big transition, like a major Gnome upgrade, and that's usually because I check for updates so frequently that all the packages aren't usually there for at least a week. As long as you have apt-listbugs installed you can avoid any big issues pretty easily.

 

[postmortemIA]

linux gives me less and less motivation to use it, as many open source things have been written for Windows. My open suse 11.4 messed itself up after security update - it locks up when it tries to load X.

 

[Nothinman]

linux gives me less and less motivation to use it, as many open source things have been written for Windows. My open suse 11.4 messed itself up after security update - it locks up when it tries to load X.

If you're using the non-free drivers for your card, it's likely their fault, but it does suck to have to troubleshoot something so integral to the use of the system. If it was something like sound that would be one thing, but video requires more knowledge of how the low level parts of the system work.

 

[sourceninja]

We are going to move to debian for our servers the next time we do an upgrade. Currently we use LTS releases without issue, but we are worried about the direction of ubuntu.

 

[Nothinman]

We are going to move to debian for our servers the next time we do an upgrade. Currently we use LTS releases without issue, but we are worried about the direction of ubuntu.

On the bright side, you have that option. If we were talking about Windows and you didn't like their direction, you're screwed.

 

[joetekubi]

After extensive troubleshooting, the problem appears to be an issue between Grub 1.99 rc1 and Intel i915 video used in my laptop. I used Parted Magic live CD to repartition my disk and create a partition for 10.10, but I still can't boot that directly, since the base problem is Grub which is installed in the MBR.

At one time, I thought I could install Grub 1.98 (used in 10.10) and overwrite Grub 1.99, but it turns out that they are incompatible!

I subscribed to Natty updates emails, and I expect that this will be solved eventually, but in the mean time I'm going to have to move all my development environment to the 10.10 partition.

 

[lxskllr]

I'm just a dummy, but couldn't you uninstall Grub, then reinstall the version that works for you? You could then lock that package to avoid update breakage.

 

[jae]

I been thinking about going back to Ubuntu 10.04.X after being on 10.10 and Mint 11.. both were fine, just small quirks here and there.. but 10.04 was perfect for me. I'm also looking at Mint Debian.. but I want something with gnome-shell ggrrrr!

 

[joetekubi]

I'm just a dummy, but couldn't you uninstall Grub, then reinstall the version that works for you? You could then lock that package to avoid update breakage.

As best that I can determine, Grub2 (actually 1.99) is the problem. Grub 1.98 (used for 10.10) works fine for me. Since I've read that 1.99 and 198 are incompatible, I've been unwilling to take the chance of borking the Natty partition by installing Grub 1.98 on the MBR. I've got a workaround now, I boot 10.10 (Grub 1.98) on an external usb disk, and have set that grub to mount a new 10.10 partition and my home partition on boot. After some apt-get action, I am back and running. Thank the gods for Parted Magic live cd. I've also subscribed to the Natty changes email list, so I can tell if an update to Grub 1.99 is in the pipeline.