Alice in Ubuntuland
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Alcibiades Sep 24, 2010 11:10 PM EDT |
This is totally nuts. The upgrade path is ridiculously complicated, and bound to go wrong for lots of people. The short time the release is supported is ridiculous. The lack of testing which the release schedule requires is ridiculous. If ever there was a classic example of why Ubuntu has become part of the problem, and not part of the solution, this article has it down pat. |
| gus3 Sep 24, 2010 11:31 PM EDT |
I thought only the first releases in even-numbered years were Long-Term Support releases? |
| tracyanne Sep 25, 2010 1:23 AM EDT |
Quoting:The upgrade path is ridiculously complicated, and bound to go wrong for lots of people. As far as I can tell upgrading is a doddle, I've seen lots of non tech users upgrade flawlessly, (in none of the non tech users I have running Ubuntu has hadany problems with the upgrade process, I've talked them through it on the phone, and then they do it), and even on my machine where I've got al sorts of non standard repositories and applications installed, I never had a problem. |
| caitlyn Sep 25, 2010 1:59 AM EDT |
Well I have had problems. An upgrade from 9.10 -> 10.04 left me with a non-functional netbook. In my experience in place upgrades with most distributions are not a sure thing. That is hardly unique to Ubuntu. Claiming there is never a problem just doesn't squre with my experiences or with those of lots of other people I know. I even remember tuxchick (Carla) writing about a broken Ubuntu upgrade a couple of years back. |
| tracyanne Sep 25, 2010 3:02 AM EDT |
@caitlyn, beats me. I can't work out why I rarely have problems with Linux, and have had so few problems over the years, that includes from 2000 Mandrake, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Mint, and yet other more technically competent people than I, do. It makes no sense to me. |
| gus3 Sep 25, 2010 3:21 AM EDT |
@tracyanne: Do you trust the system? Does that trust lead you to tinker with it less than would one with an analytical mind? When I hear, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," my mind responds, "Everything's broke, on some level." I can tweak anything. My problem is knowing when that's a bad idea. |
| Scott_Ruecker Sep 25, 2010 3:34 AM EDT |
gus3; I think tweaking while working on computer hardware is a bad idea, just thought you should know..;-) |
| tracyanne Sep 25, 2010 6:25 AM EDT |
Quoting:Does that trust lead you to tinker with it less than would one with an analytical mind? Not sure what you mean here gus, I've got all sorts of non standard repositories configured, I install all sorts of Software. I even uninstalled the entire mono subsystem to get rid of F-Spot, and the other mono dependent applications that I don't use. I have both GNOME and KDE applications installed, with most of the KDE dependencies in place. As far as I'm concerned I tinker. At various times, I've gone so far that I've broken things, and had to reinstall to get everything working again. In part because I'm not sure what I broke. I'm not running the standard kernel, I've replaced it with the preemptive kernel, according to the documentation in Synaptic it's for servers, but it works perfectly for me. I've also got the RT kernel installed, but I've not actually got round to testing it, the preemtive kernel works so well for me. @Scott tweaking is probably a bad idea all round. |
| Alcibiades Sep 25, 2010 8:30 AM EDT |
What strikes me is going from one release to another step by step, whereas of course with debian you are on a rolling distro. The elaborateness is the remark in the article about how you must do each update in order. Its appalling that people who know no better will think that this is how Linux is. "Note that upgrades to version 10.04 LTS and beyond are only supported in multiple steps, via an upgrade first to 9.10, then to 10.04 LTS" |
| Jeff91 Sep 25, 2010 9:03 AM EDT |
@Alcibiades They have "LTS" releases for just this reason. Beyond that if you don't want to reinstall your operating system every three year (the best way to upgrade Ubuntu IMO) - then start using one of the many rolling release distros. They are there for a reason. ~Jeff |
| number6x Sep 25, 2010 10:49 AM EDT |
The more third party repositories and the more self installed and self compiled apps you have the more you have to do to upgrade Ubuntu. I bought a laptop from Dell 3 years ago with Ubuntu 7.04 installed. I figured I would wipe it and add debian or a slackware derivative like wolvix (which I had running on an IBM thinkpad from work and found to be nice for laptops). I left Ubuntu on the laptop for a while and got used to it and have had no reason to change it. I have upgraded each release, a few months after the release date, and have not had any problems. As I have added more third party repositories and self compiled apps the job has become more difficult. I have to check to see what will work after the upgrade and try to find substitutes. If I were just using the Ubuntu repositories I think that it would be as simple as Tracyanne reports, simply click the button thingy and type my password. the 7.04 to 7.10 and the 7.10 to 8.04 were that easy for me. As long as the hardware on my laptop is supported, I don't think I'll be changing distros on it. Of course I alway try live cd's and have another partition to install other distros into to test compatibility, for when the time to switch come. Mint Debian edition is on the extra partition now. |
| caitlyn Sep 25, 2010 12:07 PM EDT |
Tracyanne: I don't know how to answer the question you raise. You mention Mandriva and I, too, have never had a Mandriva upgrade go less than perfectly. I've had Fedora go pear shaped twice and Ubuntu three times over the years. It may have to do with the hardware I use (Toshiba laptops for lots of years, Sylvania or HP netbooks over the last two years) though I've had problems on a pretty standard desktop on occasion as well. It may also have to do with software selection. I definitely don't think it has anything to do with the technical skill of the user as the upgrade procedures in these distros is really straightforward. I don't discount what you say. I can only relate my experience which is different from yours. |
| tracyanne Sep 25, 2010 6:02 PM EDT |
@caitlyn, My old boss, when I first started working in IT, would have put it down to Cosmic rays. |
| Steven_Rosenber Sep 25, 2010 8:51 PM EDT |
I finally made the geeky leap to keeping an OpenBSD installation at -stable rather than the unpatched -release, and it isn't at all difficult. My last in-place OpenBSD upgrade (4.4 to 4.5) didn't go so well, but I will try upgrading my OpenBSD 4.7 install to 4.8 just to see if I can do it. After that OpenBSD 4.4 upgrade blew up, I moved to Debian Lenny, and my months-ago attempt to upgrade to Squeeze died because I didn't have the foresight to grab a newer kernel first to avoid udev-upgrade hell and then Aptitude wanting to delete just about every package. I took a laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS, and once I got the right command-line switch, it worked, and all I've had to do was change the configuration so NetworkManager could actually ... manage the network. It had been so long since my 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10 upgrade where I had to do the same thing that I had forgotten all about it. But both upgrades did work, even though there were problems. I'm having a problem right now with the 8.04-10.04 — GNOME Screensaver is killing X. Same thing happened on another laptop (identical Intel 830m video); moving to Xscreensaver was the fix (and I'm using Xscreensaver in Fedora now and am very happy with it). Due to my particular ATI video chip in this Lenovo laptop (G555 with ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD), Fedora 13 didn't even wait until the next release before breaking my video with the introduction of KMS in 2.6.34 kernels; luckily I've preserved the last 2.6.33 so I can continue running with the open ati driver (as opposed to the fglrx, which works with KMS turned off but brings other problems along with it, principally extreme slowness). What I'm trying to say is that I'm getting tired of all this. If Debian Squeeze holds out as liking this video chip, I'll be back with it when Fedora 13 support runs out. My only problems with Debian occurred when upgrading an existing Stable installation to Testing. I've never done a Stable to Stable upgrade, and I expect that by the time Squeeze is Stable, the Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade will be a smooth process. |
| mrider Sep 27, 2010 12:30 PM EDT |
I've never done a Stable to Stable upgrade of a workstation, but I have a very minimal "server" that I upgraded and it went better than flawless. Previous to the upgrade, I had this weird problem where Debian wanted to rebuild the modules directory after each apt update. Here is a link to where I ask the question: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/apt-get-up... As I say in that question, the original install was from a net-install disk. Further, I did not have any way to get past our NTLM proxy when I was building the computer, so it started out VERY minimal. I had to add even the most basic stuff. Strangely enough, after I upgraded from Etch to Lenny, the problem magically went away. Of course this is an extremely minimal system - so YMMV. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!