Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to …
Running a Rock laptop with dual core and an Nvidia card
Went from 9.04 to 9.10. Now I also know that .10 Ubuntu releases are kind of "inbetween stable" releases so I was aware that they are often a bit more problematic than the .04 releases
But no. Everything worked.
I THOUGHT I had it slightly screwed, but that was my fault changing a config on the boot resolution and I revered that and everything is tickety-boo.
I've tried Windows 7, it's meh
I installed ubuntu 9.10 on both a laptop and a desktop computer both were easy flawless installs. Everything just worked. The laptop is an el cheapo Toshiba from Wal-mart (came with visa home on it,deleted) did the laptop install with a usb key, that was fast. The desktop is a workstation with a 3ware raid controller card and lots of drives and devices and things, all still works just like it did in the last four ubuntu version installs. I always to fresh clean installs.
If you are going to report from forums you are going to get a slanted view as a disproportionate number of people in forums have problems, the reason for forums.
9.04 to 9.10 - no problem at all. Well, apart from Grub getting broken in the upgrade - once that was fixed, it's been a perfect pussycat of an upgrade - even down to hibernate working with the closed source nVidia drivers for the first time.
Win7 from Vista, otoh... <waves large hammer, threateningly>
Wish I'd not bothered. Driver issues. And - considering it was coming from Vistula - that's saying something...
A direct quote from the site:
*** 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 :
“many problems that i’ve not been able to solve”
Karmic Koala install/upgrade
Upgrade – 273 20.19%
Install – 276 20.41%
Voters: 1352.
Jaunty Jackalope install/upgrade
Upgrade – 375 18.20%
Install – 302 14.65%
Voters: 2061.
Interpid Ibex install/upgrade
Upgrade – 482 24.57%
Install – 388 19.78%
Voters: 1962.
Installed Karmic on Parallels on my work MacBook and, apart from the Parallel tools not supporting it, it works perfectly.
The notification area modifications suck big time.
Had to manually switch the update manager icon back on with a "registry"-type fix so is OK for now.
Apart from that, seems to be pretty stable and usable.
installed on my aspire one (ssd hard disk 512k) no problems, no messing with terminal (unlike Jaunty). very reliable
installation CD will not boot on my desktop (Sempron based) moans about USB devices.
love it on the acer, sees windows network, works on the school network (including picking up their printers) never had to use terminal yet.
must have put alot of work into the netbooks and forgot the rest
I put 9.10 386 on a lashed-up 2GHz box and it all worked fine.
I put 9.10 x64 on an old dual core advent box and it all worked great for me.
Fresh installs onto old ( ie 80gig ide hard disks ) stuff using the auto-dual-boot-making feature.
Much better installer than XP ( it will be a few years before i get a vista or win7 serial number handed down, and I will not be buying a copy with actual money unless it makes it into an ASDA £2.99 bargain bin ).
flawless install on my aspire one 16gb netbook but my daughters new Dell mini 10V suffered a critical kernal failure, re installed clean, had to upgrade video drivers and its been fine.
I am using the netbook remix but on the Dell when it failed it appeared to have installed the full version and filled the entire 8gb SSD!
Not perfect but all in all it works.
Paris - rough round the edges but does what it says on the tin
keitai: you might prefer the Fedora policy with regard to such drivers; Fedora only accepts kernel modules that are part of the upstream kernel, or have been accepted for inclusion in an upcoming upstream release. It does not accept out-of-tree drivers or staging drivers.
rebecca putman: you can thank Fedora / Red Hat's Dan Williams for the work on improving NetworkManager's 3G data support: http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2009/06/22/mobile-broadband-assistant-makes-it-easy/
ac 09:00: "I know they've been criticised in the past for not giving much back to the Kernel, but that misses the point. The contribution they've made to the whole desktop experience is outstanding." - I'm afraid you're the one who misses the point. The kernel is just an example for the fact that Canonical contributes very little to _any_ significant upstream project, certainly relative to their size and available resources. Canonical uses a lot of work from other projects and companies (Debian, Red Hat, Novell and others) but tends to market itself as if it were the be-all and end-all and all the work was coming out of its own offices. Canonical does not 'contribute' very much to 'the whole desktop experience' in terms of actually paying the developers who work on all the components that make up the Linux desktop. Concrete examples...kernel has been noted. Canonical does not employ anyone who makes significant contributions to X.org (the graphics stack used by all Linux distributions). They do not employ anyone who makes significant contributions to ALSA (audio support). They make relatively small contributions to NetworkManager (network applet, includes 3G data support etc) and PulseAudio (higher level audio stuff), significantly less than Red Hat. They make relatively small contributions to GNOME, less than several other companies. They make no or very little contribution to KDE, much less than Mandriva or Novell. They do not contribute significantly to many other key components like udev, hal, DeviceKit, PolicyKit, Evolution, OpenOffice, Firefox / Thunderbird...it's tedious to go on listing negatives, but basically Canonical just contributes very little to any of the major F/OSS desktop software components.
iolaire: Palimpsest (and the underlying DeviceKit-disks) is something else to thank Fedora / Red Hat for: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit . Written by Red Hat's David Zeuthen, Richard Hughes and Tomáš Bžatek, it first landed in Fedora 11.
iain34: "blasphemy"?! exaggerate much, or are you just _that_ passionate about ubuntu forums? :)
herbert meyer: have you filed a bug for your Fedora installation issue? if so, can you send me the URL? (irc adamw or email awilliam AT redhat D 0 T com may be better, El Reg only updates comment threads periodically)
On proprietary drivers - for anyone who installs using the NVIDIA or AMD-provided upstream installers, there's nothing Canonical / Ubuntu can do. These are fairly crap in terms of integrating with proper distribution methods of looking after things like kernel updates. If you install the drivers with those installers you're just going to see things break on distro upgrades and there's nothing your distributor can do about it. However, if things are breaking on machines where the drivers were installed using Ubuntu's approved method, that's a bit bad and I'd really have expected them to make sure that worked prior to release. Can't comment any more specifically, though, as I'm not familiar with the process Ubuntu uses for these drivers. It is an icky area to deal with, when I worked for Mandriva we had lots of issues with it too, it took a lot of releases before we managed three or four in a row where there weren't any problems with upgrading when using the proprietary drivers.
In general, frankly, every release of any operating system has some bugs, and upgrading is always a tricky scenario - as others have pointed out, for Windows just as much as Linux. The general volume of issues with Ubuntu 9.10 seems pretty middle-of-the-road to me, pretty comparable to most distribution releases, or most Windows releases.
Disclaimer: I work on Fedora for Red Hat, but this post contains strictly my personal opinions, not those of my employer or the Fedora project.
I did an upgrade from 9.04 on my Acer Extensa 5620 and it has been great. No problems whatsoever.
While the upgrade was going on, I was running XP in a VM to sort out somebody's XP over remote assistance. Got their's done about 10 minutes before the upgrade finished, finished the upgrade and after rebooting, the only thing I had to do was let VMWare recompile its modules. I've since enabled Compiz for a bit of eye candy and it is STILL all good.
Surely the vast majority of upgraders are without problem and those with problems are in the minority? Sounds more like FUD to me.
I've just been through it with my GF's vintage laptop (cf: came with Windows ME, been Kubuntu since Hardy) via software update. I should note that this only happened in the first place thanks to a bit of investigation on my part, whereby I discovered that update-notifier-kde had been silently b0rked for what may have been months. The K-side of package management apps have been a great disappointment in the Kubuntu experience.
The dist-upgrade process went off without a hitch, but rebooting brought a GRUB unhappy prompt. I've done amateur diagnosis and this is what I think:
The patient was originally partitioned with /boot as a separate partition at the start of the drive (old habit of mine). The Hardy installer had set it up to boot correctly and previous dist-upgrades hadn't caused any problems.
This time, it puked on the GRUB command "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-*****" presumably because the partition doesn't become /boot until it's mounted during init. Note: I've no idea whether it used this path previously.
Rather than changing grub.conf (which I imagine would only be undone by later kernel upgrades) I worked around it like so:
cd /boot
ln -s . boot
Other than that, there's some problem with init that causes a delay when mounting the root and swap partitions from fstab, which I hope to resolve after some forum-skimming.
However, in the time since Jaunty was released, no updates have caused any such problems before now. Like some posters above I consider it a fairly OK outcome given it's a whole-OS upgrade plus early-adopter syndrome.
Compare it with my 3 Gentoo boxen in the same period, and they've all been rendered unbootable and/or X non-startable more than once each thanks to factors entirely predictable but not addressed by the portage system. Of course I run the unstable version, but faced similar episodes with almost-equal frequency when running stable on an older box.
Second the motion for horns and halo Tux icons!
"No, it isn't the ease of install that makes Windows popular, it is because it is the default install on new machines. Doing a re-install of Windows on a machine is a PITA with all the updates, driver downloads etc, etc. required."
it's a bugger when your linux distro won't see your modem, (serial or usb) and you can''t even begin to think about downloading at all.
Hi, basically the snd-hda-intel module is really a generic interface to lots of different cheapo audio chips, each have their own method for controlling the hardware, known as a codec parser in the module documentation.
There is a long ist of the right codec parsers for each audio chip supported by the driver, the
suitable one is selected on module load by the kernel.
Most of the time this works just fine but when it doesn't, like for you and for me, you can override the kernel choice by adding a line in the alsa-base.conf file, with the name of the module and the name of the codec parser option.
so <module> option=<codec-parser> means load this module and use that codec parser.
So when you add "snd_hda_intel option=XX" to the alsa-base.conf file, it tells the sound driver that it should use this specific set of commands (codec parser called "XX") to do things like enable volume for the module called "snd_hda_intel"
There is a list of the matching options for sound card models as reported by lspci -vv
here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1043568
A bit of trial and error trying different options from that list and with any luck your sound card will be back in use.
Hope this helps.
Sed
I'll just wait for Fedora 12 which is due out sometime this month. Typically it will get released, and be followed by a bunch of updates. Then all is right with the world.
Of course I don't update that quickly, as I am currently using a Fedora 8 machine to write this with (it has the 2.6.26 kernel).
Mmmmm.... this is strange. I tried this afternoon the 9.04->9.10 upgrade on the exact same hardware that gave me problems this morning. Surprise, absolutely no problems. My problems therefore were related to some package that one machine has and the other does not.
Score for me now is Flawless 2 - Slightly problematic 1
If you reported problems with the upgrade:
1) You're lying.
2) You're spreading FUD.
3) It's your fault.
4) You should have done a scratch install instead of an upgrade.
5) You're obviously too clueless and incompetent to use a computer, much less run Linux.
Glad to see that, whatever changes Linux itself has undergone in the past few years, the community remains just the same.
As long as you're using anecdotal evidence, I've updated from 9.04 to 9.10 on 5 different systems (4 physical, 1 VM), and had no problems worthy of report.
I don't doubt that some people may have had issues, but I'm not seeing anything newsworthy
The great news is that any real problems will be fixed on the install discs ISOs, and new users won't even see them when they download/burn them in the coming weeks. Go ask MS if you can download newer slipstreamed ISOs without giving thousands of dollars for an MSDN subscription.
And the really beautiful thing about Linux is that you can do a *clean* install and get all of your apps user settings back by copying in the config files for the ones you want from your old home directory. Even system apps only need their /etc files restored. Try doing a clean install, and selectively get back all the related Windows registry settings for your Windows apps.
FUD.
@hikaricore
Maybe you should look in Installation & Upgrades on Ubuntu Forums. Plenty of very annoyed people there, enough for a lynch mob in fact. My warning is that if you have either Vista or Win7 and want to install Karmic to dual-boot, GRUB2 is likely to break the windows bootloader and you won't be able to boot into windows. Win7 + Karmic = Boot Fail. You have been warned.
After using the online upgrade the last two times around, I bit the bullet and moved up to the 64-bit 9.10 build on my Asus AMD 939 mobo with NVidia integrated GPU. Overlaid the existing root and /boot slices, kept my existing home partition. Loaded the NVidia proprietary drivers after the initial install.
Only issue I ran into was sound on MPlayer. Bypassing the PulseAudio server for direct HW access fixed that. Other than that, Just Frakkin' Worked.
There are atleast as many problems with Windows upgrades. All the people knocking FOSS are going to tell us that upgrades to Vista went entirely smoothly.
That said, I have found Ubuntu less reliable than other distros (Mandriva, Mepis, etc.)
Evil, put /home on a separate partition, and you do not need to bother with copying everything back.
I'm running Kubuntu Karmic, and I upgraded in place from Kubuntu Jaunty, I did not do a fresh install.
Seems to work better with ATI drivers, I've got the proprietary driver working for the first time since I bought this A780GM integrated motherboard. Nice to see the good old spinning cube desktop change running here again.
I'm happier with it than I was with Jaunty.
Minor rough edges. Workarounds mentioned not guaranteed to work for everyone.
1. USB ports after hub not recognized. Workaround - unplug, replug, enjoy your peripherals.
2. Suspend (pm-suspend - mine is set up with uswsusp) only works when you push power button, not from keyboard. Since it works on wake-on-LAN, it would be nice to see it fixed, but I'm in no hurry. However, if you want this to work consistently, you need to find a place to put (as root) ethtool -s eth0 wol g - best way to do that is to add it as a pm-suspend quirk so it'll get run during machine shutdown.
3. Sun Virtualbox does not print from WinXP with Kubuntu Karmic host. Presumably, you've already enabled yourself as a member of the vboxusers group. Add yourself to the lp group as well.
4. Network management applet still does not work properly. This may be because I manually edited a few files to deal with the same problem in Jaunty.
5. Proprietary driver manager (access via Hardware Drivers from menu) does nothing when you click activate button. Workaround - install envy-ng from repository and run it, if it won't run from the menus, use sudo envyng-t from terminal to run in text mode ... and it's easy once you do this.
Presumably, people who adopt Karmic a few weeks from now will find all or most of these problems solved out of the box.
No horror story, no drama. Just another routine upgrade that leaves things running better and looking cooler. Oddly enough, I'd been having serious trouble with Debian since Squeeze (DRIVERS!!!), I did a fresh install to Kubuntu Jaunty a few weeks ago in the hopes that Kubuntu would deal with driver issues better. It does.
The title is very misleading & biased. There are several users who did not face problems & are enjoying Karmic K. I can vouch for how good Ubuntu is as I have been using it for more than a year.
Persons who have a flawless install / upgrade are likely not to report it as that is what we expect from Ubuntu and is thus not newsworthy.
Also note, there are rivals who badly hope Ubuntu fails so that they can keep milking their cash-cow OS’s. Therefore, I feel there are several exaggerated or blatantly false accounts posted on the web.
But my friends, "Satyameva Jayate" ( सत्यमेव जयते) = that is Sanskrit for: "Truth Alone Triumphs"
I have installed 9.10 on 3 different systems. All were clean installs. All worked flawlessly.
I am very happy with 9.10.
If you tried to do an upgrade instead of a clean install, that is a self-inflicted wound.
One system dual boots with XP, one with Vista, and my laptop triple boots with XP, Vista and Ubuntu.
Whenever you move to a new operating system, Windows, Ubuntu or anything else, ALWAYS do a clean install.
OpenSUSE 11.1 would not recognize an external hard drive (ext3 file system on it, but that is no problem. Kubuntu 9.04 seems to be working fine. I will upgrade when the NVIDIA driver issue has been sorted out. This hassle still compares favourably with fresh installs of Windows NT/2000/XP on run-of-the-mill hardware.
@Adam Williamson 1: If you bring out a distro, and claim drivers are supported, you cannot then say it is NVIDIA/ATI/whoever's fault if things do not work
I must say that I had absolutely no issues upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10. I installed it through the update manager and it was mostly on auto-pilot from then on. I have an AMD Athlon 1.6GHz with 1Gb of RAM and a 512Mb NVidia graphics card. In addition 2 HDDs one 40 and one 80GB both IDE. ASUS Onboard Sound. Played Open Arena on it so graphics are working fine, installing new application through the new interface is also fairly straight-forward. It definitely took me much less time to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu distribution then it did to upgrade from Vista to Win 7. Not complaining on both counts.
Yep. Most of them seem to be stuck in the days of computors in big rooms with lots of people paid to just run the things and act with a bad attitude to anyone outside this clique of scientists. What they don't realise is that they are no longer respected scintists but grubby mechanics, and they should drop the car mechainc "treetem like crap" attitude soon.
@Karmic Install: "I avoided the "upgrade" option should be avoided; a fresh install works better... bad news for those who used to store their home directories in the same filesystem (the default, with Ubuntu like with Windows);"
Not particularly bad news - just whip out a flash drive or USB HDD and tar archive the whole of /home to it. Do the fresh install, recreate the users and then restore the tar archive - job done (I know this because I've done the 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04 'updates' this way and the non-netbook 9.10 will be done the same way). Heck, if I could be bothered to save the passwd, groups etc files and merge in then I wouldn't even need to recreate the users. And this does work - to a much lesser extent - with Windows XP too.
@Tom Maddox "So, let's recap the fanboi comments " - what a load of bull, if you look (even here) you'll see folks trying to help out the ones with the problems (same as Windows - gasp!). "Experts" saying "you're too stupid" tend to not last that long - same as any other troll - unless the user is really being lazy (e.g. insisting said expert come around to their pad and do free technical support/consultancy/paint-the-fence/wash-the-car/etc). That said, I am also one of the folks recommending a fresh install rather than an upgrade, but my next one'll be the 8.04LTS -> 10.4LTS sometime next year - given the major jump I think a rebuild would be more desirable (if for no other reason than to purge the software cruft that'll have built up in the past year or two - that system is used for software development and test). But that's no different to XP Pro -> Windows 7 Pro, the MS-supplied docs say to do a fresh install and then reinstall apps (thats another one for the long dark nights of winter).
Now if some kind person can tell me how to get restore a username/password type in, rather than the crappy, point-at-the-name-and-click login screen for UNR then they get kudos +1 from me.
Hi Adam I think you are comparing Apples and Non-Apples
Everyone I know has great respect for Redhat.
But Redhat has a Market Cap(Mil) of 4837.11 and is making good profits.
Canonical is a private company of 200 employees not making any profit atm.
Now Mark Shuttleworth, I believe, is covering all the bills out of his own pocket so its a bit rich to be comparing the two in such a way.
> Canonical uses a lot of work from other projects and companies (Debian, Red Hat, Novell and others)
Well I don't see that as wrong, after all the software is FOSS, you are allowed and encouraged to do this!
>but tends to market itself as if it were the be-all and end-all and all the work was coming out of its own offices.
Maybe this bit gets to your fundamental concern?
I have never seen Ubuntu marketing say anything of the sort myself maybe you have some links to back this claim up?
> iain34: "blasphemy"?! exaggerate much, or are you just _that_ passionate about Ubuntu forums? :)
Not sure about this I will have a look at iain34's post but the Ubuntu Forums are brilliant :)
>It is an icky area to deal with, when I worked for Mandriva we had lots of issues with it too, it took a lot of releases before we managed three or four in a row where there weren't any problems with upgrading when using the proprietary drivers.
Hmm interesting I actually paid for the boxed retail set of a Mandriva distro thinking I could move over to Linux - It was a while ago :)
Mandriva at that time was nasty and unfinished.
I actually binned it.
I don't really see what you have got against Mark & Ubuntu except envy tbh.
I know it must be annoying when people new to GNU/Linux refer to the whole thing as "Ubuntu" but I don't think thats anything to get the hump about - they are new to the whole FOSS thing and will get it eventually.
I also think you miss the large contribution that Ubuntu does make.
1. http://ubuntuforums.org/ is probably the best advertisement for Linux and the values behind Linux that you could get.
It not only provides the best support on the web but it is polite and encourages community building and outreach.
2. It has poured money in to desktop Linux and produced a fine polished product that users love.
3. Its great at marketing and generating excitement for each new release.
4. Mark has the vision thing :)
Over the weekend I upgraded 3 PC's to Kubuntu 9.10. Yes, all right, I upgraded, next time I'll do the fresh install instead. I guess I came out lucky not to have inflicted any too serious injuries on myself.
Anyway, two upgrades were absolutely flawless. The third gave me some trouble.
The upgrade stopped right after the initial download with an error about package dependencies between mythtv and mysql. I finally managed to resolve that using aptitude. I proceeded the rest of the upgrade from the CLI as well. Not nice, but I got it to work in the end.
Mythtv stopped working. I should have read the release notes. It was an easy fix after I found out what to do.
My system was bogged down with nepomuk using 100% cpu. After I made a fix, which took me a few minutes of googling to find, the thing worked. And I must say, I do like the desktop search possibillities this offers. It's even more promising for the future.
I also had some issues with akonadi, which I need because all my contacts and appointments are in a kolab server. As of this realease kontact depends on akonadi to access those. I got that sorted as well, but this really should have worked out of the box
It was however a good learning experience, because in previous releases I took the easy way out and disabled akonadi, nepomuk and strigi. This time around, I had no such option.
In summary, I had some dark moments, but the light is shining ever so brightly now :-). I agree with everyone who likes the KK release, but in all honesty the ride to get there could have been a bit smoother.
As to the canonical discussion. Maybe they might contribute more, but they are a great enabler for a relatively painless transition from windows to linux, and they get every credit for that. And ubuntuforums is a great community.
> Canonical is a private company of 200 employees...
That was something that I've often wondered. Can you breakdown by job function? I'm curious how many are actually doing technology/support, and how many artwork, marketing and other fluffy stuff?
[And yes, I /am/ an *buntu user, but am amazed at how little progress Canonical seem to have made in the last year or two towards that seamless user experience...]
I've finally spoken to somebody first hand who has had issues with the upgrade. He traced his issues to something simple, but annoying. He'd mucked around with his xorg.conf rather than letting it sort out it's own drivers as is the default these days. He has an ancient ATI card and had told Jaunty to use the radeon driver with a whole load of settings. When he upgraded it all turned to shit.
He restored the system, returned xorg.conf to it's defaults upgraded again and had no problems. The curious thing is that he then returned xorg.conf to it's original state and everything still works. We've no hard evidence for this, but it appears that the xorg.conf file was confusing the upgrade process in this case. Surely that's something that should have been tested, but I suppose they can't test for every driver and every setting.
Oh, and to all the Windows Fanbois: Please bear in mind that for many of their products MS advise against in place upgrades and in some cases it's not even an option.
And of the whingers can I just ask, what sort of fucktard performs an OS upgrade without taking an image of the system first?
Put 9.04 on one of my machines and it loaded fine.
Went to use XP and found on reboot that the OS selection did not include XP.
Denied that there was a HDD on my machine !
Ruined the whole HDD...now its a FAT 32 and not an NTFS.
Tried a shed load of escape ideas to no avail.
Please Please Pretty Please..an UNINSTALLER would be nice.
Thank the gods it was not my main computer.
Bruised and bloddied but ready and willing to try again.
If I find a nice working UNINSTALLER.
The nurse has arrived with the pills so it's back to the darkened room.
Still a newbie...since 1960's.
'sed gawk', about your instructions for fixing xserver-xorg-input-evdev's handling of volume control keys: they're b0rked.
$ apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-evdev
$ sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-evdev
$ sudo apt-get install devscripts
$ cd xserver-xorg-input-evdev-*
$ wget http://pastie.org/681181.txt -O - | patch -p1
$ sed -i -e '1 s/)/+0)/' debian/changelog
$ debuild binary
$ sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-evdev_*.deb
There you go. 'Properly' packaged (the version number bit is a hack) and installed; none of this crashing X because somebody forgot "--remove-destination" in their 'cp' command. All that's now needed is to log out of X and back in again…
I had the infamous screen flicker after upgrading. Logged in via ssh, installed the "failsafe" (VESA) video driver:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.failsafe /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Instantly X started and all was well. Seems the screen flicker was caused by the X server continually starting/crashing/starting/crashing/... And the original xorg.conf installed by the upgrade process seemed wrong - it did not even specify a video driver.
I may bother to install the actual nVidia drivers eventually, but for now, I have a working system.
So, let me get this straight - first you argue that Red Hat is big and successful and Canonical is small and struggling (because that's convenient for the first part of your argument), then you argue that I (let's recap - I work for Red Hat, the big successful one) must be envious of Canonical (remember - that's the small, unprofitable, struggling one)?
How's that work, then?
Anyway, it's fairly easy to deal with your 'big vs. small' argument: Mandriva makes rather more useful upstream contributions than Canonical does, and Mandriva is a smaller company and certainly ain't making a profit. Heck, Debian probably makes more useful upstream contributions than Canonical does and that's an entirely volunteer-based community. It's not a question of size or monetary resources, it's a question of policy and philosophy. Just about every significant Linux distribution in the history of Linux distributions has understood that it's only fair play to make an effort to devote some of your resources to feeding the general ecosystem of which you're one part...until Ubuntu. If all distributions and distributors acted the way Ubuntu does, it'd be massively harmful to the development of the actual important components on which they all rely. Ubuntu's great at philosophy, it's strewn all over the website, lots of stuff about the awesome way in which Ubuntu is made and the Ubuntu community is treated &c &c &c. But almost nothing about the wider community upon which Ubuntu relies to such a great extent.
I wiped my 9.04 install and created a fresh ext4 partition for 9.10. The live disc worked fine but once installed I had this bug too. All I had to do to fix it was install the drivers for my GeForce 8600 and reboot. Which begs the question; why were they not installed?
I've only used 9.10 for a few hours so far, not long at all, but so far I'm not overly impressed. It doesn't strike me as being any faster or more responsive than 9.04. Firefox actually seems a little slower.
The difference in boot times is negligible but shutdown is a lot faster (that could be because I haven't mounted my Windows shares yet, 9.04 was shutting down the network before attempting to unmount the shares, and coming into problems of course)
I've noticed one or two minor bug fixes but nothing major. I've still got plenty of configuration to do before it's truly my system again, so maybe I'll be more impressed when I'm done.
At the moment however I'd recommend not bothering if you're happy with 9.04.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
