Ignorance is bliss

I upgraded using the package manager the other day not knowing about any problems and it went perfectly. Not that I notice much difference now. The only surprise is the long download time and I have a pretty fast connection. In any case I image backup my systems and it would have been easy to back out if problems had occurred.

You're S O full of it

Either you are a NS shil, or you simply hate Ubuntu? 'Cause you're so full of it that no one could ever take you for an objective writer.

You ought to know that there are MORE then ONE forum for Ubuntu users. And because the four users you pull out had issues with Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't mean we all did. But that's what you are claiming none the less. You are either brave or unbelievable stupid, don't know which.

Ubuntu 9.10 has been stable since Alpha 5, and the crap you're shooting about an old kernel simply isn't true. I run Ubuntu 9.10 and run the distro kernel which is 2.6.31.14 so your crap about Ubuntu 9.10 installing kernel 2.6.28 may be due to your glasses is in need of a cleaning.

And the claim about /home-encryption is equally wrong. I have eCryptfs, as it is named, installed on my system and it runs flawlessly. You can't even tell it's there, but it IS, I've checked.

So. Jump back to what ever stone you crawled out from and enjoy your Win-box.

KaKao reminded me of the ole times...

I'm using a UMTS modem and I was nicely left out in the cold by borked routes and a squeaky-clean resolv.conf . Never bothered to go past this point and slapped back the backup image of the 9.04 install. Bleah!

Flawless upgrades on Samsung NC10 and Virtualbox

No problems to report - just waited a while for the packages, clicked "OK" a few times and there it is. Nice shiny new Ubuntu, and I love the cellular modem support for my NC10. Works on my Sony Ericsson MD300 data card. Awesome! What's not to like?

Linux ubuntu-box 2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:04:26 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Karmic support is horrendous

I asked a simple question: "how do I change it to boot to Windows by default". 17 wrong answers (referring to the Grub1 method, which no longer works), quite a few "don't knows" and a few links to a 3 page verbose history of everythign GRUB2 releated on Ubuntu that may have answered my question if I were a hardcore Linux user.

If Canonical are hoping Ubuntu is anywhere close to being usable on the desktop by newbies, they are badly mistaken, it's still decades away at this pace.

Not the big disaster for me

I thought the standard practice with Ubuntu was, wherever possible, to do fresh installs rather than upgrades. Anyway, that's what I did (9.10UNR version) and it was pretty seamless.

Three downsides:

1. The first post-install update seemed to bork Firefox. Trying to launch it just gave a very small (and blank!) window almost off screen. A cold restart seemed to fix this one.

2. Not keen on the new UNR layout - the old one was (imho) far better even though there was less space for the 'desktop'. I also really, really hate the (Gnome I presume) click-a-username-to-login screen, much prefer the old school "type in your username and password" (which I think a little more secure).

3. The new one-stop software install app is trash - I ended up falling back to Synaptic (to install the Medibuntu addons).

Apart from that, it was good news for 9.10UNR on my Acer Aspire netbook: the wireless connection (previously flaky, especially when trying to do large update downloads) is now solid; the wireless light works (and gives good indication of load); bootup and shutdown are definitely faster; and the netbook "feels" more responsive in use.

I'd give it either a B+ or A-.

Generally good ...

I ended up doing a clean install on an Acer Aspire 7520 and was very pleasantly surprised that wireless and audio, which had previously been held together with string and NDISWrapper on 9.04, was now working very much better using native 9.10 drivers out the box. Graphics had always worked fine, still do.

All peripherals (printer, camera, etc) all work fine. Can't say I've noticed any improvement using ext4 over ext3 but that will probably come into its own at some point. Boot time IS much longer, though, than with earlier versions. No errors, just slower.

Wow

Wow...alot of comments...

I agree with AC @ 05:07, forums are a bad place to run polls on this kind of thing.

My experience has been OK: two machines both running perfectly. There was a blip around the alpha5 upgrade where my netbook got borked, but I think alot of people had that problem.

While I like the 6 month release cycle as it gives me something to look forward to, I do feel that releases get a bit rushed. Either they should extend the time between releases, freeze earlier or just be less ambitious.

flawless for me so far

Having done a clean install of the RC on the spare partition everything just worked on my desktop. Used EXT3 without disk encryption so this is compatible with the older (8.04 LTS) production system. I need to do further testing and configuration of my somewhat weird (research) mail system before making this partition the production system.

For those doing the full install or upgrade, and are complaining about imperfections or worse, better to report the bugs upstream and remember that this is the only way open source improves. If you can't stand the heat of something going wrong then either stay out of the kitchen by using LTS releases preinstalled on hardware chosen and built for Linux by someone else who knows what they are doing.

Add me to the count...

Same problems as discussed on the forums when installing on an nForce mobo with 6150 GPU...flickering screens, no GUI, unable to start X...sigh.

Finally did a complete re-install, and still have a few problems with the disks...thought it was ME, but at least I now know that it isn't. I had no problem with the 9.10 BETA on the same hardware, go figure!!

Where is the Shuttleworth with horns icon?!?!?!?

My experience so far.....

I have upgraded 3 machines so far, one print/file/mythtv server, one client laptop and one client desktop.

Firstly I should have read release notes relating to mythtv - a database upgrade on the new version of Mythtv is not backwards compatible.

Other than that no problems. The server and client desktop were upgrades, the laptop a clean install.

Lots of command line work required on the clean install though, for fstab, samba, grub* etc. New folk will most likely be doing clean installs, surely there is a lot of benefit to be reaped by giving these processes a GUI?

*grub has changed in prep for a GUI.........

Updated 9.04 and 9.04 nebook remix installs

NO PROBLEMS

Always done clean installs but this time couldn't be bothered. First install was on release day, took 5 hours to download and install, but no problems. (why did it have to download 1.4gb, double a new iso I wonder - anyone?)

Netbook remix upgrade was done a couple of days later, downloaded 1.25gb and installed flawlessly, all in less than an hour.

As others have said, only those searching for answers to problems fill out online surveys so the stats are massively skewed. I'd guess less than 1 in 10 upgrades have issues and thats fairly consistent for each release. As for clean install issues I reckon you could install Ubuntu on a 100 different hardware setups form the last 10 years and only get a couple of borks and a few minor niggles.

You could not do that with Win7, anything over 5 years old would simply not work at any functional speed. For the rest you would need a clean install every 2 years as your machine goes slower and slower. Oh, and good luck with keeping your system and apps automatically up to date and online banking etc etc :)

I like Slack and Gentoo from an eliteist point of view but on some machines you want things to just work and for that you want APT and Ubuntu is simply the best desktop (stress desktop not server) implementation of that. If you've got old slow hardware use Xubuntu. Kubuntu? well the blue 2-headed cousin is just for weirdos - if you must have nepomuk in your sh*t then use a good implementation of KDE, like Mandriva!

thanks guys

can i just say thankyou to all you guys who are submitting bugs and following them up during the the first month.

since the RC is only out for a few days i and many others consider the first month to be the real beta test.

i'm really eager to upgrade because the full screen flash now works on karmic for my intel gfx based laptop (broke in jaunty), but i also know that in 1 months time, most of the niggles will be fixed.

i just have 1 question - to all those with weird graphics issues - did you experience the same problem when running karmic from the live cd/usb?

This title contains letters and/or digits.

"more than a fifth of people upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 have reported issues they can't fix" eh? … er, well, (a) that's only true if _all_ people upgrading to ubuntu 9.10 responded to the survey, and (b) if that were the case, then it would in fact be quite a lot more than a fifth, since about fifth of _all_ respondents had problems upgrading, whereas only 55% of respondents were upgrading at all, so in fact the sentence should read something like “more than a third [37.44% at time or writing] of people …”

Note that the thread starts with:

“*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***/Most of users voting here are users with issues./Users with painless experience are not likely to come here./If you want to compare Karmic/release with other releases based on this poll anyway here are the previous polls :”

Mark Shuttleworth halo / horns icons please.

Don't upgrade

.. I've found its never straightforward in Lunix, so I usually do a fresh install and then restore my settings and docs from the memory stick. 9.10 works okay for me, but conquer the desktop market if punters have to keep having to track down libraries and drivers just to get the things we now take for granted working. MP3 players, DVD players, etc..

A four day slog had me begging for Windows 7

Yes, major problems. If you take into account those that did a clean install, almost half of 9.10 users had serious problems that they couldn't resolve!

I have been using Ubuntu for years, well, since the start and never known anything like it. Four full days of downloading, upgrading, failing, restoring from back up, rinse, repeat.

Graphics were my problem too, amongst others, but I have an Intel chip, so I think that the X problems are far more widespread than they are admitting. The LiveCD worked fine, but I think that this was another issue, what was on the LiveCD wasn't what was actually installed, work that one out!

I had purchased a copy of Windows 7 for a friend, and that came so very close to being installed, I even opened the wrapper, but I don't like to be beaten.

It is all working now, and the nightmare weekend is starting to fade, just have to figure out a way of hiding those finger nail marks on the walls and wait for my hair to grow back.

More problems

I installed it on my new laptop, then when I networked it, it started to "talk" to other machines, these machines also got upgraded and then installed into other machines, I believe that it has now become self aware (it also found my gun under the bed and shot my dog).

OS's are just OS's, 9.04 to 9.10 is probably more of a change than Vista to W7, so it's not a surprise that it aint that smooth, as Ubuntu becomes more popular there will be more problems, and I suspect that they won't be too different from the Vista debacle, the same would be true for Macs, this can already be seen in the Hackintosh world, if we can take anythign away from this experience its "Meh".

Yes, some people have issues, but...

Quote: "Typically, it's the more technical users overall who install Ubuntu - and early adopters tend to be the most technical of the technical."

The above is complete blasphemy, having provided support for the ubuntuforums - and moderated for a small time - this is never always the case.

A lot of our early adopters are new users, and a lot of threads are titled "Newb" or "Help" in their statement to reflect this.

I can say that I may have gotten one or two of the issue mentioned above (can vouch for the flickering screen), but common sense resolved the issue without the need for browsing the internet for the solution.

The "most technical of technical" users tend to get on with it and stay quiet, at least, that is what I like to think.

No sound for me

No sound from my M-Audio Delta 66E soundcard after upgrade. Got playback working OK now, but nothing in JACK and can't route sound properly. Grrrrrr. That'll be time wasted trying to sort that.

It is annoying. This is the first Ubuntu since 6.04 I've had any real issues with. I hope they get stuff sorted soon as it is generally getting quite good now.

Grub2 - stinking POS!

Installed on 2 machines last Friday with no problems at all. Come Monday morning, after my first windows reboot of the day my computer couldn't boot up! All it said was GRUB, and it wasn't even lunchtime. Much wasted time later and I find the admission that ETX4 and GRUB2 don't always play nicely, especially if you have an HP with the Intel 965 chipset. That's me then. Amazingly enough, I then find the admission that the GUI config tools for the startup manager are only partially compatible with GRUB2.

Question to Mr Shuttleworth's crew: Why force this untested software onto the one group of people you must keep happy (i.e. novice users)? I'm afraid you failed, badly.

The simple solution is to look at the GRUB2 help page on ubuntu's wiki, and follow the instructions to revert to the legacy version.

Apart from that, it is good. I didn't even need to use the comand line, so I have to say I'm impressed. But a little more real world testing would have kept the flames down.

Value for Money.

You get what you pay for. It's free. Get over the fact that its not as good as Windows.

Worked for me

Upgraded at the weekend. No problems at all, in fact the audio line-in feed, which had been semi-broken by 9.04, now works again.

works for me

I had been running the karmic beta on a dell 5150 laptop for two months, since I could not install fedora on it without 3 days of grief - anaconda does not like any hardware I own, I have to build a system alacarte.

Karmic ran so well, Friday I decided to re-install the WinXP system that stinks up 1/3 of the disk on laptop. It was suffering from bitRot and maggoty performance. I need windows to run a few applications, like TI education software, and some other backwards vendor's stuff.

I had a built in problem with a hole in the disk partitioning, anaconda had shrunk a fat partition without a good reason or permission, I had put a filler in between this and the linux partition. I removed the filler by booting from the karmic CD, and prepared to deal with grub's confusion about re-numbered partitions, and found out karmic uses grub2. At 1am Saturday.

After a bit of research on another computer, I found how to boot from grub2 by hand (it's not hard, just different), got the karmic back up, and went to bed.

Saturday morning, for practice, I ran grub-install and update-grub to make the fix "permanent". I knew I would have to do this again after installing windows stomped on the master boot record.

After spending Sat. morning on it, I had a fresh non-maggoty WinXP system, and the karmic dual booted.

Two questions:

1) why bother ? I use windows so little, I have not installed many apps on it.

2) what is wrong with fedora's anaconda ? I have been having a horrible time with it since June. All of my attempts are on dell hardware. If I suffer thru the botched installs, fedora works as well as usual.

Running more or less fine

Running Kubuntu version of Koala, appart from Plasma crashing every now and then it's all running fine. Guess I'm one of the lucky ones!

Running on a Toshiba Satellite A-10 with 1.5GB of RAM.

Didn't like KDE4 much though, with that silly menu (now turned off!)

Problems with Ubuntu?

Try Debian. Same great package manager (they made it) and it runs on just about anything from an old SPARC32 laptop (if you're willing to go back to etch) to a 64-bit quad-core PC.

another data point

Upgrade hosed my Jaunty install, putting it in a non-bootable state, and a state where GRUB2 was unable to boot into the old system either. Spent a day looking for a fix before I gave up and did a clean install over the old partition, and even that didn't go smoothly--the wireless driver needed to be uninstalled and installed before it worked, and the xorg config didn't support the resolution I needed.

The upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty was relatively smooth, so this is a big regression.

@Drak: Ha ha!

"Maybe if you run a story on Mint Linux you might find a useable distro being a made with only a tiny fraction of Shuttleworths resources."

That is the funniest thing I've read all week. Do you not realise that Mint IS Ubuntu. All they've done is taken Canonical's hard work, changed the theme and included a few extra packages.

Whoop-de-bloody-doo! My nan could have done that.

Oh, suck it up.

All this is peanuts compared to that time I installed SunOS 4.1.4 onto a machine whose firmware was too old to boot from a CD-ROM. (It would've been much easier if I'd had the tapes.)

1 / 2

Flawless install on my Acer Aspire One. Nevermind the crapware it installed for me, or the other annoyances pointed out earlier. It's working as it is 'supposed' to.

Complete failure when trying to install onto my file server. Used to have one of the 2008 releases on there, so I figured safe bet, right? 9.10 doesn't recognize the hard drives, of course. Fat lot of good a file server is without hard drives.

I turned to FreeBSD when my patience ran out.

Complex setup - no problems

OK - No OS is perfect. All have issues.

However, this upgrade was actually flawless for me. I have a complex desktop with lots of extra drives, dual screens, video feeds, etc. And it just worked. Click install distribution, left it for 30 minutes, reboot and Hey - welcome Koala.

The server followed the next day. Needed two reboots in total, but everything came back.

Worst moment was O2 router ceasing to route in the middle of the update, but it even survived that!

Crisis - what Crisis?

Well, I suppose you you write news based on forums, you get TrollNews.

Victims of success

Perhaps this is more an indication that Ubuntu is spreading out to the masses. Linux isn't just for beardy unix geeks anymore, or at least it's trying really hard not to be. So when grandma clicks on the "Upgrade to 9.10" button in the updater and things don't go swimmingly, are we really all that surprised? The fact that people are using it and getting on the forums asking for help when things go south I think is more of an indication of the growth of market-share and mind-share than anything else. I stand firmly by the statement that Ubuntu is the best consumer desktop distro right now and I think Ubnutu gets better and better with each release.

Oh yeah, I did a clean install on KK on my EEE 1000. Went flawlessly. I also wouldn't ever do an upgrade, but I'm kindof a beardy Unix geek (Insofar as I have a beard and have been using *nix for 15+ years).