back to article 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 …

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  1. Gannon (J.) Dick
    Thumb Up

    Never got that far

    The Verizon Broadband promised a 17 hour download. Sometimes subtlety trumps karma, I guess.

  2. Cosmin Roman
    Linux

    tradition?

    It would be a sad day when installing Linux would be flawless; where's the old times of compiling the new kernel, patchings over patchings, half-backed drivers downloading from umpteen places and chatting over irc with fellow linuxers ... happy days, they were!

    Of course tongue-in-cheek, but a bit of nostalgia still :)

    C.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Badgers

    Koala Brains

    Perhaps a mistake to name it after a creature whose brain is *much* smaller than its skull.

  4. IT specialist
    Happy

    It works beautifully on my netbook

    I just installed the Karmic Koala Netbook Remix on my Asus EeePC. I did a clean install. Works beautifully. I'm very happy.

  5. gollux
    Pint

    Coming up in the world...

    Gosh, this is almost as good as upgrading Vista to Windows 7! Can't wait to upgrade the Linux box here, I need a little pain and suffering in my life. 6.06LT to 8.04LT was mildly annoying, but this sounds more like a real OS upgrade!

  6. fred slack 1
    Thumb Up

    A snap.....

    Downloaded...started install...went to dinner...came back... done....

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Great for older machine

    Updated to Karmic on p3 933mz 768 ram. No problems

  8. Tristan Young
    WTF?

    Ubuntu 9.10 karmic Koala

    I have to agree, Karmic isn't the release Linux users want.

    I have encountered the following issues thus far:

    - kernel error resulting from suspend/wake events

    - clicks, pops and audio cut-out during log-in sound, and in few other areas, mp3 playback is flawless.

    - loss of indicator-applet and indicator-applet-session. Had to clean install to get them back.

    - cpu frequency applet asks for my password the first time I change CPU speed. There doesn't seem to be any way to grant permanent permission to access the keyring.

    - notification system is brain-dead. Who the hell designed that? Can't close the notification, and the bubble turns transparent on mouse hover. WTF?

    - empathy, evolution, etc... - give me a break - don't install crapware I don't want.

    Am I glad to have installed 9.10? Yes.

    How many times did I have to install it: (Ubuntu) Twice

    Flavors tested: Ubuntu Desktop, Kubuntu Desktop

    Filesystem used: EXT4

    Install time: Reasonable (less than 30 minutes I think)

    Is Karmic ready for prime-time? No

    Is it still fun? Now that I have my bearings, yes.

  9. Gil Grissum
    Grenade

    9.10 went "BOOM" on me

    I made the mistake of attempting to update to 9.10 from within the package manager. It downloaded and installed most of the update but did not complete. A reboot produced a laptop that would no longer boot into either Windows Vista or Ubuntu. Thankfully, I still have my trusty Compaq laptop running XP. Ubuntu 9.04 was great, but 9.10 just didn't work for me. I'm not moving on to WIndows 7. XP is going to work fine for me for quite a while. No thanks Canonical. You lost me as a customer.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Don't believe internet polls...

    Don't believe internet polls. Particularly ones which will largely be voted on by people visiting forums for solutions to upgrade problems. For my part I've upgraded two laptops and a desktop, with very different specs, from 9.04 to 9.10, and as with all upgrades I've done with Ubuntu, all three went flawlessly. Two more upgrades to go, when I get round to it.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    O/S Upgrades never work!

    Who upgrades any O/S? All O/S makers say you can and maybe 10 years ago, with Win95 and DOS you could upgrade, but O/S these days has so many components, so much meta data the upgrades are complete tosh. Simply replacing some components in the middle of a working O/S, do me a favour!

    In the last 3 months I have installed all three of the big players new toys ( Win7, OSX SL and KK Ubuntu ) on a handful of machines and none of them were upgrades, they were all backup, clean and install from scratch jobs. Touch wood I have had no problems with any of them, they all worked perfect!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    @Koala Brains

    Better than a creature whose brain is larger than its skull.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Kernel version

    I don't understand, my 9.10 came with `uname -a`:

    Linux *****-desktop 2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:05:01 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

  14. LaeMi Qian

    Funny

    I had all sorts of these issues with the upgrade to Jaunty 6 months ago forcing me to do a clean install. Managed to miss any huge headaches this time (so far - still have to upgrade my mum's word processing terminal).

  15. J 3
    WTF?

    That's bad...

    Quite bad that so many people are having trouble. As the article says, it's usually not the completely clueless Joe Windows User who ventures into installing, let alone upgrading, an OS. Specially a Linux OS. And even then, the rate of failure is high.

    A question though: have they performed the equivalent poll when 9.04 was released? What about 8.10, 8.04, etc.? Maybe things are getting better? (probably not, or people wouldn't start creating polls all of a sudden now)

    For the record, fortunately I am in the camp that had both a flawless install (of Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Eee 1000HE) and a flawless upgrade from 9.04 (Kubuntu on an ancient FrankenPC with 1.8 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM -- apparently they finally fixed the damn update manager that was a disgrace in 9.04, or at least it has worked fine so far and much more capable).

  16. Paul 129
    Happy

    Still happy

    Used this to upgrade my jaunty system. Found that compiz was no longer working, sound and printers. I had let it overwrite my sound and printer config files. Realized it had set my volume level to 0, one problem fixed, Installed the latest ATI driver from their website, and then re-enabled the cube and wallpapers, that's compiz sorted. Just been too busy to sort out the printer, I'll come to that when I need to. Everything else is working fine. I would like to try xbmc but I've got an ATI graphics card. Whilst the drivers are getting better, I haven't ever, been able to get it running.

    Pretty happy really, although, I'm used to X stuffing up with kernel updates due to aforementioned ATI drivers. It would be nice if they used DKMS or something similar...

  17. Ashley Stevens

    Hardest Ubuntu install ever

    It's gone midnight. I've just finished the 3rd install. (1 upgrade and 1 fresh before). Looking good this time, but Ubuntu's never been this hard before. Maybe it's my old hardware? (AMD Athlon and ATI R350 / 9550SE). Graphics drivers were the trickiest bit. Seems like they changed a lot this time. More of a revolutionary than evolutionary release it appears.

  18. hikaricore
    Paris Hilton

    Is this a joke?

    I've had no trouble at all and I've seen very few people with issues on UF.

    You have to wonder if paris wrote this article.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Charmed Koala on Thinkpad R40

    After having Intel video driver issues on Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 (I give each new version a try), I was very pleasantly surprised that 9.10 worked flawlessly on my IBM Thinkpad R40 with a clean install.

    The only issue I encountered was specifying the LPT printer port for a HP LJ1000 printer rather than the default HP driver port. Yes, the suspend/hibernate does not work, but everything else works great.

    I tried Windows 7 Executive, it was as slow to boot as XP, had Intel (!) video driver issues (could not get full resolution), the computer ran very hot, did lots of continuous disk swapping, even with no programs running.

    With Ubuntu Koala my computer boots very quickly, runs very cool, with no endless disk swapping.

    Thanks Ubuntu, Keep Koala-ing!

  20. Ashley Stevens
    Thumb Down

    Spoke too soon...

    OK, I spoke too soon. As soon as I turn on dual-head I lose graphics acceleration....

  21. keitai
    WTF?

    fail article

    I can't believe elreg chooses to write a article based on forum comments. Not only are forums are terribly bad source of information to begin with, but such internet polls are obviously biased in gathering people who have problems. Our enduser upgrade pilot went fine, and we'll probably proceed upgrading the rest soon. Then again we choose closely what hardware to use with ubuntu deployments.

    The key problem with ubuntu is of course that they claim to support more hardware than they are actually competent in supporting. "Ooh, lets puts this shiny half-working usb wifi driver so we can claim we support more hardware than other distros". Cue to wondering why ubuntu crashes when using wifi.

    The church-of-steve (not the ballmer one) model of selecting tightly what hardware to support, and supportinting them *well* would lead to much better user satisfaction than attempting to support all the craptastic taiwanese chipsets.

  22. jake Silver badge

    Is this all that surprising?

    *buntu is as bloated and untested as Win7 (or Vista SP2, if you prefer), and for the same reasons.

  23. Rebecca Putman
    Linux

    It's working for me!

    I did the upgrade path on both my Dell Latitude D400 and my desktop with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200; I'm having no problems. On the Dell, mobile broadband has gotten easier!

    Although I have been noticing that gnome-panel goes a little wonky at times. I just go into System Monitor and end the process. It restarts, and bob's my uncle. Or Bob cries uncle. Something like that.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Hah hah hah

    I work for MS and this article made me chuckle. You get what you pay for and all that.........

  25. James O'Brien
    Troll

    *sighs*

    And the *nixtards comeout in defense......

    Why cant we just admit no OS is perfect?

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    at least

    when they finally patch all this crap they won't call it a new release and expect you to pay top dollar. Other less ethical companies might.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Cue the new mantra: Canonical the new Microsoft

    As far a the quality of the software that they are releasing.

    Disclaimer: I don't use any *buntu but I do use Linux on my laptop.

    That said, I just get the real feeling that the quality of their releases since 8.04 has dropped dramatically. Perhaps sticking to a ridgid 'release every 6 months' is the cause and the reason is that they are trying to do far to much for every release. Some time ago, a Fedora release was delayed a month because it was not ready. Ok a pita fot the users but makes sense in the longer term.

    OR

    Could it be that Shuttleworth wants to compete with Microsoft and his ego is getting in the way of a quest for quality rather than quantity?

  28. John Goodwin 4
    Linux

    Sound always muted

    This is on two computers, one PC with an SB Audigy card on an upgrade, and a laptop with a clean install - which obviously has onboard sound.

    Empathy was replaced with Pidgin because of personal preference.

    Everything else works perfectly but the sound problem is a right royal PITA, and it needs to be fixed soon.

  29. Eponymous Cowherd
    Thumb Down

    Flickering screen.

    Had the flickering screen thing on first reboot. Solution was to boot into recovery, switch to runlevel 3, and compile/ install NVidia's own drivers.

    Not good.

  30. ChrisInBelgium
    Thumb Up

    Flawless

    Installed on a USB key to use with my work Thinkpad and fresh install on my 5 year old desktop at home, not one problem, and everything works out of the box.

    I'm impressed.

    As for doing an upgrade? Never works 100%. Not with Linux, not with Windows.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Mixed Results here,

    I run a number of *nix variants.

    Recently upgraded to 9.10 on two machines,

    1) a rebadged MSI Wind netbook,

    2) a older 1-2 year old craptop from fujitisu.

    All upgrades were performed in a gentoo vserver guest prior to cloning on to target machine.

    UNR 9.04 -> UNR 9.10

    Netbook (UNR) flawless, no problems, upgraded rebooted done.

    Ubuntu 9.04 -> 9.10

    Craptop, some problems

    1) PulseAudio,

    Reason: Ubuntu 9.10 switched to pulse audio by default, no policykit file is provided so PulseAudio HAL detection doesn't work out of the box.

    Fix: write a a policy-kit file, stick it under the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ directory.

    [pastie] My one is here http://pastie.org/681176

    2) Media key events,

    The evdev driver still doesn't send key up events on volume_down or volume_up events so

    you can DOS your own box by pressing volume_up or volume_down.

    There is a small patch to fix this that I wrote based on another bug report.

    [pastie] http://pastie.org/681181

    Fix, apply the patch, recompile and Finally copy your newly patched driver to the right location, and your done.

    N.B. The changing of the driver will cause X to restart, so don't worry when that happens.

    (this will only install to /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/input/)

    mkdir tmp && cd tmp && apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-evdev &&

    wget http://pastie.org/681181.txt -O - | patch -p1 && ./configure && make && sudo make install

    (this copies the new driver to final location)

    sudo cp /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/

    Sound

    Bug: My previously working sound card stopped working

    Reason: /etc/modeprobe.d/alsa-base.conf is overwritten during upgrade.

    Fix: only for

    Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)

    The sound card needs a line added to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

    options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo-nb0763

    That's all she wrote folks, both machines working without any other issues as far as I can tell.

    Apart from policykit/ PulseAudio all the other issues are hardware related and down to having crap hardware in a cheap old laptop.

    Hope this helps someone

  32. dek
    Happy

    Happy upgrader here.

    Upgraded from 9.04 without any problem.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Curate's egg

    I've had mixed experiences with 9.10 Karmic. A clean install on an old PC was fine and works well. An upgrade from 9.04 Jaunty on another old PC was mildly rocky - the automatic restart failed, and a manual restart was met with some error messages about unresolved dependencies; but these were easily fixed. However, a less experienced user might well have been phased - not good, really. Is all this due to the helter-skelter 6-monthly release schedule? Probably - as the point releases after the initial dust has settled are usually fine.

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Tristan Young

    "notification system is brain-dead. Who the hell designed that? Can't close the notification, and the bubble turns transparent on mouse hover. WTF?"

    I had that but I thought it was an odd artifact of the MS Virtual PC setup that I've got to use here. I did get rid of it but can't remember if it was by clicking on the desktop or pressing the escape key... let me go see if I can repro it... nah, can't at the moment, sorry.

    Anyone know anything about the boot process? The startup sequence is fine here until it switches the font/terminal characteristics and then the screen gets messed up. Reading up suggests it's a vga setting in grub but I can't find it...

  35. slack

    No thanks

    I installed 9.10 on 3 identical desktops (2 Ubuntu and 1 Kubuntu) to see what it was like nowadays. It was a nice easy install but one of them flatly refuses to find its nic, the other two do fine.

    I cannot get a Brother multifunction printer to scan despite hours and hours of reading. There are a lot of people with the same problem apparently. I had the same problem with Slackware 12.2 but a quick edit of a Udev rule fixed it, no such luck with Ubuntu. I put Slackware 13 onto the one that can't find its nic and it works perfectly.

    The Ubuntu ones look good (17" LCD monitors) but the Kubuntu one has tiny, ugly fonts, especially in the terminal. The KDE GUI controls seem to be a bit spotty at times. Overall I think that I will be putting Slackware back on to the 2 remaining boxes as I find it a lot easier to manage than (K)Ubuntu, but that is probably only because I have a lot more experience with Slackware than anything else.

  36. yosemite
    WTF?

    Not plain sailing

    I'm a relatively new Linux user (9 months-ish), but not a computer virgin (I'm a SQL DBA), so Ubuntu made sense to me. 9.04 and worked pretty well on my Acer Aspire 5684.

    However, the upgrade to Karmic ruined it (even with a split partitions for root and home). It took 5 minutes or more to get to the logon prompt and then another 2mins to an almost unworkable desktop. Lots of forum googling led me to the conclusion it was all down to the *completely* missing graphic drivers.

    Only after another 2 failed attempts did a full clean install finally work even then I had no nvidia drivers and had to manually install them with envy (text version) before the long boot times disappeared and I actually got to the desktop.

    I'm a lifelong Windows user but I have with no entrenched OS loyalty. I like Ubuntu and want to see more competition in the desktop arena but, this isn't the way to win over the man in the street.

  37. Mike Howell
    Unhappy

    All these and more

    I updated on the 9.10 rc, only to find a black screen when restarted, I have an Intel 945 graphics chip on my lap top so not sure what the problem was. So I went for a clean install and it couldnt find my USB hard drive so installed on a partition on my main drive.

    It did install and it did start, lots of popping from the sound card when logging in and it wouldnt recognise my Broadcom Wireless, I updated but still no wireless, checked forums and found a problem with FWcutter, so gave up, deleted the partition, re-installed 9.04 on my USB hard drive and am as happy as a pig in sh*t.

    My advise- if your a N00B like me wait till they solve the problems and stick with 9.04.

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    No problems

    The Dell 4 processor monster which has 7.04 and been progressively upgraded since, 9.10 works like a dream *and* the sound card now works. Dual monitors, no hassle at all...

    The T41 now runs faster that it ever did before, again, not one problem at all.

    Still, at least you know where the user data is kept if you have to make a clean install, unlike Windows where things have a habit of being spread around...

    Well done Canonical I say!

  39. popey
    Linux

    Misleading

    " Ubuntu 9.10 is installing the old Linux kernel - 2.6.28 - not the new, 2.6.31 kernel released in September, with Ubuntu 9.10 also failing to see hard drives on certain machines."

    Not strictly true. If someone was running 9.04 (which shipped with a 2.6.28 kernel) and upgraded, they would get the 2.6.31 kernel installed but for some reason the default was still the old kernel. The net result may look the same, but the situation is easily resolved with one command.

    Whilst I appreciate there have been many who have had issues with 9.10, this is balanced by huge numbers of people who upgrade with little or no issue, and who don't report this fact because it's non-newsworthy.

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Re: O/S Upgrades never work! ?

    Try a real OS. Rarely had a Solaris upgrade fail on me yet, except alpha/beta builds. Even smoother now with ZFS.

  41. PeterC

    Koala installed and working great first time!

    Koala installed and working fine first time for me - no problems at all. Boots fast, on my old Vaio VGN-SZ2XP, nvidia graphics working fine, no screen flicker. Love the new software centre.

    Tried to load windows 7 HP onto same laptop - total disaster. All drivers had problems and after 2 days of trying to get it all working fine.... I gave up and installed Koala over weekend onto the same machine. Effortless install. The speed difference between the Win 7 and Koala is very noticeable.

  42. Simon
    Gates Horns

    Maybe the problem is between the keyboard and the chair?

    Kubuntu here with ($ uname -r) 2.6.31-14-generic

    All works perfectly, even plays all region DVD's and syncs to Wm6.1.

    Thanks Medibuntu.

  43. Mage Silver badge
    Linux

    Flickery Screen

    I prefer clean installs.

    I did one install no problem, the 2nd PC the graphics was an old Creative GB300 and was very poor (faulty output signals, not SW) so I put in an old ATI card instead. Flickery screen and unable to log into console during boot to reconfigure as characters typed only occasionally entered, no * to indicate if a password char has been entered or not.. A reinstall fixed it.

    A happy penguin.

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fear Uncertainty Doubt

    Can anyone say FUD?

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Kernel version

    It may be that the bootloader, Grub, has not have been updated correctly when upgrading.

    The installer defaults to keeping the present menu.lst file, and the Kernel version may then not be updated. The menu.lst file can be updated by hand, it is at /bbot/grub/menu.lst

    The Ubuntu forums are very helpful.

  46. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Unhappy

    I did a clean install (wiped my old openSUSE 10.3) and...

    flickering screens (NVIDIA graphics) refusal to log in even in text mode. REALLY crap. Back to openSUSE (11.1, for now and 11.2 in a few days).

    What is also very stupid of Ubuntu is that I cannot find an option to download the older version (9.04) anywhere.

    Bummer

    Fortunately I did back-up

  47. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    9.04 was better

    I suppose this is the thing about foss, if this was an MS product I would get PSS to get me some hotfixes, but hey.

    I've experianced really odd problems with some nVidia cards, once the driver's installed some won't go above 640x480 (although they did with the same driver on 9.04!!!) and one of my laptops keeps getting serious kernel problems. And these were clean installs Doh! At the end of the day it is free though so you do pay for what you get! Hehe... I liked that comment about losing a customer :)

  48. Colin Guthrie
    FAIL

    @Tristan: Notifications

    I'm not an Ubuntu user, but it was my understanding that the notification system was introduced last release? I have to agree with you overall tho'. While the graphics on notify-osd are really pretty (and macslow is one of the best graphical OS coders out there - following his blog is a treat and he's a very nice guy to talk to too), but the decision to not support the "actions" part of the notifications spec is IMO a seriously bad decision on Shuttleworth's part. Their guidelines on all the apps they now have to patch to support this (most libnotify clients incorrectly assumed that "actions" support was available to be fair) actually suggest rolling your own UI to handle the cases where you want feedback from the user. In a time when KDE is finally adopting this standard and we can hope for some kind of cross desktop consistency in this is totally bucking the trend and basically telling people to "do it your own way".... it laughs in the face of HCI guidelines :(

    I wrote a longer tirade on this topic earlier in the year:

    http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/02/desktop-notifications-and-user-interaction/

  49. noroimusha
    Pint

    nice release

    apart from the occasional clicks and pops coming out from the speakers , on one instance X did not start up but re-tried and it worked fine. ( HP dv6615em )

    Ubuntu is still very good most of my non-technical friends ask me the question :

    Q: What kind of windows is this ?

    A: LOL, this is linux

  50. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Halo

    My experience with 9.10

    I did a clean install of 9.10 and everything worked. I encountered one small problem in that the speakers on my laptop would make an intermittent popping sound every 5-10 seconds. A quick search on the Ubuntu forums solved the issue straight away.

    I needed to install some extra drivers to get my wireless working, but Ubuntu detected my wireless card and found the correct drivers for me automatically and the whole process from detecting, to download and install, to reboot took less than 2 minutes.

    I have been using Ubuntu on and off since 5.04 and this is without doubt the best version yet.

    I would say don't be put off by this article if you're thinking of trying Ubuntu. You may have a few teething problems, but there's always the option to try the Live CD first without installing anything, or you can install it without changing your Windows partition at all, so there's no risk. If you do a full install and have problems, the Ubuntu forums are an awesome place to get help and support and almost any problem you have, the chances are someone else has already had and solved it, and posted the solution there.

    I can't recommend 9.10 highly enough.

  51. Stuart Tomlinson
    Thumb Up

    no issues here

    Installed 9.04 netbook edition about 5 months ago on my Mini9. Did the upgrade via the update manager at the weekend, took about 4 hours all in (not the best internet connection at home) and working flawlessly.

  52. Anonymous Hero
    FAIL

    Ready for normal users?

    Man if this was a Windows 7 upgrade fuckup there'd be 2000 comments here all howling and whining about how shit MS are and why the fuck you'd ever consider anything other than XP.

    Linux ready for the desktop....I don't think so.....ever....

  53. Andrew Matangi

    More or less ok

    Upgraded a Mythbox (Ubuntu 9.04 running Mythtv) from package manager and went perfectly. Did clean install of Karmic on a Dell Latitude laptop that dual boots XP and Win 7 and have only two issues:

    1. Constant notifications that hard drive is about to fail

    2. Constant notification that terminal server applet is faulty

    Pretty happy overall

  54. Subban

    Flawed poll much?

    A poll on a forum where people normally visit to get answers to problems might just possibly be giving a skewed result... maybe ?

  55. DaddiesIsBetter

    Went alright

    Gone from 9.0.4 to 9.10 on an old piece of crap Acer laptop. Went perfectly.

  56. Merchman
    Flame

    KDE

    The problems I encountered, upgrading and then clean installing, onto a netbook seem to stem from adding KDE to the system. On all occasions, upgrade and install, full ubuntu and NBR, the installation (and re-boots into) Gnome are all fine and dandy. It is only when I convert the system to KDE and then reboot do I get a black screen and hang on boot. And to make matters worse, with Grub2, I now have no access to a recovery menu, with the grub menu hidden by default, and you have to access the system to enable it - whoever thought of that needs a slap!

  57. jimbarter

    um...

    I've got 9.10 and win 7 installed in dual boot mode on my dell laptop, no problems with the 9.10, win 7 gave me some headaches hunting down drivers for the newer hardware...

    but installing any OS is not something for people to take lightly, and should not be done by the man in the street, IMHO.

  58. Jez Caudle
    Thumb Up

    Acer Aspire One A110

    I did a clean install and now the box flies. It is much faster than 9.04 - the lag gas gone and the wireless network connection is instant - before it would take upto a minute before connecting.

    My install was flawless and I'm loving my netbook again.

  59. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Awful sensationalist article

    "Still, that proves that Ubuntu has a long road to haul before installing even this popular Linux distro is the no-brainer that helps makes Windows the success it is among regular PC users."

    Yes, ease of install is EXACTLY what makes Windows popular.

  60. Florence

    Never quite understood the fuss

    Ubuntu isn't a bad distro - and they're certainly good at marketing themselves - but whenever I've played with it (admittedly not since 7.10) I wasn't impressed and also ran into problems (X, wifi etc), and generally I found it less usable than SLES or Mandriva/PCLOS. Definitely not the distribution I would recommend to new users.

  61. Peter D'Hoye
    Boffin

    Mixed results

    Upgraded two systems last weekend. One went smooth, no issues. The other gave me a blank screen. Turned out to be an issue with the AMD/ATI catalyst drivers. Went back to a clean X conf file, and when that gave me back my gui, I re-installed catalyst. Worked fine.

    So a minor (but for inexperienced users FATAL) hiccup

    I have to say that some of the features in 9.10 feel less than properly tested.

  62. Anonymous Custard
    Thumb Down

    Why didn't I wait 24 hours?

    Updated from 9.04 to 9.10 last night (well tried to), but now just after I log in, the whirly wheel under UBUNTU stops, the machine freezes and the machine's dead.

    If I'd seen this article 24 hours ago I wouldn't have bothered doing the update. What a difference a day makes!

  63. phoenix
    Badgers

    Yes and No

    One machine upgraded flawlessly the other two one a laptop, the other 2 year old hardware snapped. I am not too hurt by this as we had some cracking OSX borks on upgrading. Generally it is better to go from a clean install I think as less chaff gets brought foward froim the earlier incarnation. As AC05:41 kernel is 2.6.31-14 so maybe the author's machine has borked. Happy days.

  64. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Ha ha!

    Installed Karmic on my main machine and an old Thinkpad. Each worked flawlessly. It looks lovely, it's responsive, and it supported all my hardware straight away without me having to do a single thing! What sort of fool upgrades anyway? Just do a clean install. Worried about data? All my stuff's on external drives or living in the cloud somewhere... Uuurgh, can't believe I used the C word! ;)

    I even installed Wine from the repositories and Office 2003 installed as if it was a regular Windows machine. No messing about required - no command line stuff, no scripts, no obscure packages required. Very impressed. And before anyone points it out - I know there's OpenOffice, I just like trying shit out to see what happens! :)

    The only minor niggle I have is with the new version of Grub. The configuration works slightly differently to the old version, which really threw me at first but a quick search of the Ubuntu forums soon found an answer. Also for some reason my big box hangs on boot and says 'Loading Grub' for about 15 seconds - and then proceeds to the boot menu... Odd...

    I have to take my hat off to Canonical and the rest of the Ubuntu community. It's not perfect by any means, but they've come closest to creating a Linux desktop that my nan could use. Quite frankly, there's some fucking awful distros out there, but this one has got it bang on. 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.

  65. Mr Spoon

    Love / Hate

    I love Ubuntu once it's installed and working.

    However. Their QA for new releases is and almost always has been shockingly bad. I'm pretty sure they can't possibly have 20 or 30 machines in a variety of configurations around to test releases on or they would simply see how buggy they are. That or the obsession with time based releases trumps releasing a solid system.

    I think I've had one Ubuntu release upgrade flawlessly, and I normally install each release on 3 machines, pretty much every time one or two of them have serious upgrade failures that I wouldn't be able to fix if I hadn't been working with Linux for as long as I have. This time it's the nvidia kernel module failing to compile for the release kernel.

  66. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Wireless Problems

    Wish I had waited now the most annoying problem is wireless support. If your SSID is hidden forget connecting wirelessly...

  67. MarkOne
    FAIL

    Crap

    I had a 9.04 system running perfectly, decided to wipe clean and install 9.10. Took me 6 hours to get my Wifi working (that worked flawlessly in 9.04). That 6 hours involved about 16 reboots back to a working WIndows 7 installation to get online and get support.

    This is very typical of Linux in general.

  68. Joe Carter
    Thumb Up

    Seamless upgrade for me

    My 2p. Downloaded and updated while still watching telly on mythtv then surfing the web.

    One reboot and up and running with no problems. Work colleague also upgraded no hassles.

  69. emastro
    Go

    Only a minor annoyance

    Only problem I had upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 was the disappearance of audio from all media players - I was not using the preferred pulse audio output (most of it wasn't even installed) and when i set up everything worked just fine. I've had far worse experiences in the past (upgrading to 8.10 practically destroyed two out of 4 machines at home).

    I am NOT, anyway, going to upgrade my wife's computer until she goes somewhere for a week...

  70. Michael

    just works

    Admittedly on a fresh install on a new machine. Downloaded in around 40 minutes and installed and logged in in under 20 minutes. The only depressing thing was the time to transfer my old virtual machines to the new machine.

  71. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Told ya so...

    Firstly, which techhies do an upgrade? I consider myself a tech, but always do a clean install of ANY new OS. Upgrading is just asking for trouble! I wouldn't even dream of 'upgrading' from the Beta to the RC, or from the RC to the final version. Stoopid, Stoopid, Stoopid. These guys deserve what they got.

    Secondly, I've been onto Launchpad (the Ubuntu reporting site) reporting issues with my graphics drivers. In my case, on a Matrox G450MMS, it's Xorg that has changed significantly, not Ubuntu. Matrox are being complete arses with their drivers. They are the new ATI I think, but I can't blame Ubuntu for this.

    What is possible is to put the Repos back in for an older version, which you know works. Then you can roll back Xorg to a version you are comfortable with, and lock it. Any Linux 'guru' should know how to do this, and if not, it's documented to hell on the net. Just do a Google. It's how I learned.

    I totally agree, this might block newbies from learning Linux, but much of the Xorg arch has changed and manufacturers are not really keeping up. They've been busy priming for Windows 7. Where are their priorities going to lay?

    I think this article is right in some ways, and wrong in others. I agree totally that some users not so experienced with Linux in general will find this a nightmare upgrade. The faults are in manufacturers and Xorg however, not with Ubuntu. The same fiasco happened when Vista was released, remember? Many manufacturers had not re-designed drivers to the new Windows model, so hardware went dead. Now 7 is out, most have had time to change or have been forced to. However Windows has a HUGE following. Ubuntu's only problem is that the new release uses new architecture in the Kernel and Xorg, and many manufacturers have not caught up to this yet.

    Any competent IT techie would have installed 9.10 in a spare partition to test it first, and then moved to that as a working OS if they were happy. Then your 9.04 partition becomes the partition ready for 10.04. So I do disagree with this article, in saying it's Linux tech's that are having problems. Those that are having problems are the ones that "Think" they know what they are doing. Those that "Think" they are cool running Linux, but really don't have an f'ing clue. Any tech knows those sort of people, and the BOFH knows exactly how to deal with them. Drop 'em down a lift shaft!

  72. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Huh? Are we using the same OS?

    I have had no experience of any of this. Flawless is how I would describe it. Then again I'm using the x64 version AND have significant skills in computing, so it might just me. :)

  73. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Nasty Microsoft

    Don't beleive the Internet - Windows 7 sucks and LINUX and Apples Macs are brilliant and much much better at everything in world EVER !!!

  74. iolaire

    Seamless upgrade here..

    Did an online upgrade of my 9.04 system, didn't hit any snags at all. Got a fairly standard dell box, just whacked the "upgrade" button on update manager and went for lunch. MY favorite shiny new thing so far? Palimpsest.

  75. Robert McCracken
    Thumb Up

    All fine here.

    Not a single problem here.. Dell D830 works like a treat and its much better. HD access quicker and streaming video to another is machine very smooth (which it wasn't with Jaunty). For me its fixed a lot of the niggles that I had with Jaunty.

    As for the install process. I clicked the network upgrade option and came back 30 minutes later, all done!

    I wouldn't put it past MS to post a extra problems to make Ubuntu look bad.

  76. Ray2k
    Happy

    Happy customer

    I've upgraded my laptop and desktop both without a hitch. I was especially pleased when the upgrade _fixed_ my X startup problems on the laptop!

    Downers so far are the new login screen, and I can't seem to find the battery monitor any more - neither of which are a big deal.

  77. Sluggy
    Thumb Up

    No problems whatsoever

    Upgraded using package manager on 4 machines, from a 400Mhz Celeron with 128MB up to the 3.3GHz Core2 4GB with each having different chipsets (AMD, Intel, nvidia) , graphics (ATI/AMD, nvidia, intel, neomagic) and RAID (none, RAID0, RAID5) configurations. 2xXubuntu, 2xUbuntu and not a single problem on any of them unless you count the addition of a couple of packages and services that I didn't want.

    That was not the case with 9.04 or any previous version so it gets a big thumbs up from me!

  78. Ole Juul

    Use the current LTS version instead

    Hardy Heron 8.04 is still the current long term support (LTS) version. For production machines and corporate use, or if you don't want to fool around, then the LTS is what you should be using. It offers 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server edition.

  79. SilverWave
    Go

    Karmic is rock solid - Best Ubuntu Ever.

    If you are risk averse wait until 9.10.1 at least. D'oh!

    I don't even go looking until the RC is out but the installation was smooth and quick.

    Clean Install, but keeping /Home, is the way to go IMHO

    ==========================================

    I do a clean install but reuse my /home drive leaving all the .files in place.

    If I have any problems I can just reinstall 9.04 again.

    Oh and, of course, back up home and etc to an external USB drive.

    I have separate partitions for "/" (root) 10GiB; /home 100GiB; swap 8GiB; /windows; /backup.

    Set your partitions up from a LiveCD with Gparted then go the manual route in the installer options. You may want to have a run through using a virtual machine first ;)

    Small issues I have had:

    1. Flash is not recognizing mouse clicks in multiple situations:

    Fix: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/410407/comments/143

    2. Video is tinted blue after update

    Fix: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gstreamer0.10/+bug/409640/comments/16

    3. Karmic tries to load rt2870sta AND rt2800usb. Results in no WiFi

    Fix: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/460323

    Yes there are some bugs but as its FOSS you can fix them in double quick time yourself or just wait for the fix to be pushed by Ubuntu.

  80. Jamie Kitson

    Minor Bugs

    I've upgraded two machines, one was flawless and one had the kernel issue you mentioned, which is actually a minor bug, apparently actually caused by grub1/2 issues, fixed by reinstalling grub2:

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/449679

  81. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    what do freetards expect from a free OS?

    if you want a professionally written system, install WIndows 7.

    What's the next Ubuntu going to be called ? Bovine exctrement ?

    Mine's the one with a bulletproof Windows 7 DVD in it

  82. bexley

    works ok for me

    i uograded form 9.04 on my T42, Advent 4213 netbook and my hp workstation - dx 2250

    the only majpor problem i have had is with firefox and that got fixed within hours by an update.

    overall it is *much* easier than installing windows and making it usable. i didnt have to go off hunting for drivers manually, i did not have reboot several times during the install etc....

    my main gripe is that the update manager should support bit torrent since i have a crappy internet connection and so do ubuntu (their servers were slow slow slow)

    you can get the distro by bittorrent but no the individual updates. shame but not a massive problem.

    this article seems a little unbalanced to me. anyone that has early adopted a windows distro can attest to the same problems, remember xp before sp1?

  83. Andus McCoatover
    Welcome

    Karmic (9.10) - Two machines OK, one not so...

    Upgraded seamlessly on my 8-year old Compaq Deskpro ES - 700meg/512M ram machine. Works fine. Lan, GSM/WCDMA modem, peripherals - no problem.

    Trying the same on my dual-boot IBM T30 laptop - bollox! It's got the minimum specified RAM - 256Meg, so I think that would explain why it's too busy thrashing the disk to let me actually use it. Once I could actually get in, everything worked, albeit slowly. Having said that, Windows-XP aint so pretty in that respect, either. Jaunty (9.04) works well on it, so I'll wait for the next dole cheque to get more RAM before I try to upgrade again. OK, it was upgraded about a week before the offical release date, but...I still went back to Jaunty.

    (Fortunately, it's my "occasional" machine that I only use when rare websites absolutely require - and can't be fooled - using Windows)

    My Asus 701 4G loves Karmic, too. Wifi? No sweat.

    I wonder others are experiencing a problem with either encryption, or the new Ext4 filesystem - which I elected not to use...I'd have used ReiserFS, but as the maintainer can only be contacted by snail-mail (PC's not usually permitted in jail) I gave that a miss, too.

    I, for one, welcome our new marsupial overlord.

  84. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    A-OK

    No problems for me installing KK. Although it was a clean install, which might help. Comparing to Win7, from what I've seen, that appears to need a clean install too to save hairpulling and general early greying.

    So much of a muchness?

  85. iainm2

    Negativity

    It is a pity that we focus on the negative in this country. What we need to remember here is that we get Ubuntu for free - yes that's correct FREE. Perhaps we should look at what has been achieved with Ubuntu since the earliest version. Windows - easy - don't make me laugh. I am a Systems Admin with a mixed environment and Windows is not without it's problems - the big difference is that we pay a lot of money for those problems. Interestingly enough, the faults are usually solved through various helpful forums which Microsoft has little if any input into. So, perhaps a little perspective would be good. Ubuntu is a fantastic offering which does pretty much what it says on the tin.

  86. Joe Montana
    WTF?

    Less than 10%

    It's not surprising less than 10% of people who posted to forums had successful installs... I had successful upgrades on 2 machines and just got on with it, didn't even think about posting anything anywhere until i read this story, and this is a news site rather than a support forum - people visiting support forums usually only do so when they need support.

  87. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    it was dissappointing

    I didn't have all the problems people have had, but it was still a huge dissappointment.

    After trying win and mac offerings recently to boot into X and find that my nvidia graphics are not drivered correctly and that the graphics are far from crisp clean and inviting. Extra cr*p like empathy and evolution (can i choose not to have them?).

    .... and its still BROWN!!!!!

    I have tried most linuxs but stuck with debian then ubuntu for a while now, but too many times have the frequent release cycle of ubuntu produced something that is little better than last time and not addressing big issues like AUDIO and GRAPHICS.... basic stuff in desktop computing!

  88. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Intel 845 display trouble

    I've done three clean installs and one upgrade. The upgrade and one of the clean installs were flawless but the two cleans onto Intel 845-based systems have blank screen start up problems and random display freezes. When they do run, video performance is terrible. Something has gone severely wrong here - not enough testing.

  89. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Clean install on Parallels no problem

    Well apart from the Parallels Tools not being compatible.

    I installed it to see if the hype was justified. Unfortunately it isn't. Linux is still only for techies with time on their hands. For Joe Public; stick with Windoze or OS-X

  90. Peter 44
    Happy

    Just add my tuppence-worth

    I did a clean install of 9.10 onto a Samsung NC10 which already had Windows XP. I did a repartition of the hard drive and have Kuddly Koala and XP happily dual booting.

    Can't see what all the fuss is about.

  91. Doug Glass
    Go

    Say It Ain't So, Joe!

    Isn't Ubuntu just supposed to work? Oh, sorry ... that's Glock.

  92. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Kosmic Krap ?

    There's a good reason why many ( most ? ) people buy their PC's with OS pre-installed, unfortunately Linux doesn't have the advantage MS does.

    Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) was the first which installed flawlessly and worked out the box for me. I was starting to shift in my negative opinion of Linux but it appears I may have been premature.

    What the Linux community frequently seems to forget is that even experienced techies aren't necessarily experienced Linux users and are quickly out of their depth. Fixing Windows issues may be second nature after years of doing that but Linux is a whole new ball game.

    Maybe everything will be sorted by the time we get to Pouting Paris.

  93. spegru
    Linux

    Balance

    Good to see The Reg showing they are not biassed to Linux (gives alot more cred to the good stuff).

    On the other hand my Kubuntu upgrade 9.04 to 9.10 was flawless.

    Your milage may vary of course, depending on how fancy your setup (encypted hard discs, 64bit systems etc).

    Mind you, comments about waiting for a month are pretty useless as the downloadable image will be the same as it is now so if you cant get an initial boot from which to update, you will still be stuck. A clean install is probably the way to go if you are having problems. Just copy all your files to an external disc and copy them back afterwards. It's really not that hard.

    On the other hand you could wait for Linux Mint 8, which will be based on Ubuntu 9.10, due in November. Perhaps they will have smoothed things a little, plus you will get the benefits of preinstalled codecs, flash, thunderbird email and a really nice non-brown look.

    To @ Cosmin Roman - you know what? I have to agree that it's all got a bit too easy recently - I learnt alot more when it was more difficult!

  94. Mountford D
    Thumb Up

    Problems? What problems?

    Did an upgrade from 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 (Karmic) without any major problems whatsoever. In fact I doubted if it had actually worked. My GNOME desktop looked the same as it did, as did everything else. There were a few minor niggles that confirmed the upgrade had indeed worked and I was running 9.10 with minor teething problems but everything I normally run on a day-to-day routine worked as they did with no show-stoppers.

    All I can say to everyone is that make sure you have your system fully updated by manually running the Update Manager and dong a Check. Apply all updates before attempting the upgrade to 9.10.

  95. Bob Kentridge

    OKish

    One 32-bit upgrade, one 64-bit upgrade. Both needed new Nvidia drivers, apart from that just fine... The kernels are both 2.6.31-14.

    ps - not a linux fanboi - this is podsted from my XP laptop

  96. Rob Beard
    Linux

    No major issues here

    Not had any major issues when installing on my Acer Aspire 2920. I was running 9.04 and upgraded to 9.10 Alpha and then through the Alphas to the Beta and RC, not had any problems.

    I did however backup and do a complete reinstall of 9.10 when the full version was released (mainly so I could start fresh without Vista dual booting). It's working fine here, Intel graphics performance is MUCH better. Compiz is useable (although I tend to disable it, eye candy is nice to show off but I'm not fussed about wobbly windows).

    My Vodafone mobile broadband USB stick also works better now too, the MicroSD card is detected (in 9.04 it wasn't picked up).

    The only issue I've had so far is with Ubuntu 9.10 on an older Athlon XP PC with NVidia MCP2 and onboard Geforce 2 MX graphics. The NVidia driver was unstable and the default free driver limitied the display to 800x600. I've read up that there are similar problems on other distros too. In the end I fitted a GeForce FX5200 which works fine (and frees up some more memory).

    As a big fan of Ubuntu I think it's a much better release, but I am also of the mindset that they could do with a bit more testing, I've had major problems with other releases of Ubuntu (usually fixable, but sometimes show stoppers) and I think maybe even another month of testing the RC might make a difference.

    Rob

  97. Leo Maxwell
    Thumb Up

    all fine here

    Biggest complaint is that it is not easy to find the 64bit desktop variant on the website.

    Installed it on my test rig -AM2 4200, no problems whatever.

  98. Ian McNee
    Stop

    Upgrade within days of release =/= most technical of the technical

    C'mon Gavin - we know you're only a hack but you're a hack on El Reg: engage brain before uttering such nonsense! Anyone who has *worked* in a production environment and is responsible for maintaining the delivery of a service for more then five minutes knows that the last thing you do is download and install the latest version of anything as soon as it's released - except in a *test* environment.

    Yes it appears that there are a few issues with Karmic and those that have been burned are those "must have" jockeys whose jaw drops at the paint job rather than kicking the tyres and looking under the hood. The "most technical of the technical" know that when the soft and smelly hits the rotating and blowy on a live system one's time appreciating one's favourite hop-flavoured beverage at the local hostelry can be severely curtailed.

    <smug>

    I'm certainly not the most technical but I only moved from 8.04/SuSE 10.1 to 9.04 Desktop & Server a couple of weeks ago. When the dust settles on Krazy Koala in a month or so I might stick it on a test box to see if the tyres squeal and the suspension is improved when I take it for a spin. Or I might be in the pub entirely undisturbed by anxieties about long evenings at the CLI resuscitating X.

    </smug>

    Happy Tuxing!

  99. Chewy

    No real problems for me

    Have upgraded one desktop and one server. One issue I've encountered was the version of Tomcat I'd been using was no longer in their repository. No issues at all with the desktop even with Nvidia drivers.

  100. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Absolutely no problem....

    Just ran the upgrade last night when pushing up the Zs and it worked a treat on a Toshiba Tecra M9 - even managed not to clobber the other OSs on the laptop - OpenSolaris and SXCE - which is more than Windows managed.

    and I'm with AC @05:41 GMT - Linux **** 2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:05:01 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux

    Perhaps the early adopters who reported the kernel version issues didn't to let debconf deal with their GRUB config files or elected to do it themselves and forgot?

  101. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Linux has changed for the better

    Have not used Linux for years, and am a happy Apple Fanboi. A few months ago I decided to install 9.04 on an old PPC G4 Powerbook, which went pretty well, with all hardware installed and working great (graphics aren't perfect, but easily usable). Decided to update to 9.10 from the package manager and it went without a hitch. Very snappy, epecially using XFCE as a WM.

    If I could sync my iPhone with it I would be sorely tempted away from the devil's dumplings of Apple on my main Macbook.

  102. rincewind
    Unhappy

    So

    I have mega problems installing this version, it just craps out after login, something to do with graphics drivers, also dont get me started on the wireless drivers rubbish.

  103. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Panic! Panic!

    Upgraded to 9.10, rebooted to a kernel panic due to the fstab.

    Quick use of Google-fu to find I'm not the only person suffering from the same thing (I'm a relative noob), boot from a livecd, then :

    mount -o remount,rw /

    sudo dpkg --configure -a

    let it do it's thing, and Bob's your cross-dressing Auntie.

    Was still a lot less hassle than my Win7 install on my laptop that tries to install an update at every boot, fails, reboots, removes said update, reboots at every single startup now, until I CBA to sort it out (or install Ubuntu).

  104. GrahamT
    Unhappy

    Mixed results

    I updated both my Ubuntu Linux systems. Acer Aspire 5630 Laptop with Release Candidate, and PC with final release on day 2.

    I had no display problems with the update from 9.04, neither with the Intel Graphics on my laptop, nor the ATI graphics on my desk PC (using open source drivers) and the desk PC went very smoothly overall. Everything appears to work.

    However my laptop was a different story: Bluetooth has stopped working, Ubuntuone stopped working until I did a complete uninstall, autoclean and reinstall, and I have had several complete lock ups where the laptop wouldn't even reboot, and one Kernel oops (can't remember the last time I saw one of those). I have also had to fsck the ext3 filesystem on reboot after these lock-ups. I occassionally have PulseAudio crash, and even the reporting applet.

    Several updates later, it now seems to have stabilised (though Bluetooth still isn't working).

    I will persevere, but I think this has been the worst Ubuntu upgrade I have ever installed (since 6.10) I thought it was just me after seeing all the positive reviews.

  105. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    LiveCD

    It's just a shame there isn't a LiveCD version of 9.10 which you could run from a CD or usb stick to see whether your hardware will work or not before choosing to upgrade the o/s permanently.

    Oh hang on. Yes there is.

    How's the Windows 7 live CD coming along? No, didn't think so.

  106. NB

    only one problem so far

    suspend/hibernate -> resume fails utterly if you encrypt your home drive. This is proving something of a pain and I'm considering taking a backup of my data and doing a complete re-install. Other than that I've found it to be an ok release. Probably should have waited a month or two before upgrading.

  107. Jon 66
    Stop

    Calm down

    If you install any bleeding edge distro the minute it comes out on a machine you rely upon you're asking for trouble.

    And I'm sure it's worked perfectly for most people. I get more hardware incompatibilities installing Windows these days. I do understand the need to seek the most newsworthy angle though.

    You make it sound like this is the end of the line. They'll identify and fix the bugs very quickly as they listen to their users. That's how open source works...

    I stick with the LTS releases personally.

  108. Mahou Saru
    Linux

    I guess I'm lucky....

    Did an upgrade on my 1000HE and it went fine. I guess the main problems of upgrades is bloat. As an example I got a bunch of kb input systems on netbook, whilst on my freshly installed desktop I just have ibus, which works very nicely. Still trying to get used to Empathy over Pidgin, I'll give that a bit more time but I might move back. Only problem I have so far with KK is that my encrypted partition (luks dmcrypt) shows up in Places, and before anyone says anything about how it is meant to show, it contains my LVM volumes so there is no need to display the device twice!

  109. Mike Taylor

    I had two issues

    First ever, in many years of using ubuntu (and being command line averse).

    1) Upgrading using software manager seemed to die. PC rebooted into 9.10, but froze with some white / black gobbledegook. Clean install from 9.10 worked fine. It's possible that the machine got turned off halfway through, kids looked a bit guilty. I'm going to give it a month before upgrading my production machine and laptops.

    2) 9.10 machine only gives me 640 and 800 res monitor options when plugged into a monitor / keyboard switch. Is fine when not. This is a new, but weird problem.

    Main complaint is that Ubuntu is fugly - fonts, colours especially - and means it's decidedly hard to swank about.

  110. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    No problems here

    I did a sort of upgrade/fresh install in that /home is a separate partition on my laptop so I basically formatted the primary partition and did a clean install and told it where to find /home. So it found my customised desktop/wireless settings and so on. OK so I had to re-install a few things that I guess if I'd done an upgrade it would have done for me but it got rid of stuff I'd installed and then stopped using.

    I'm on a Medion S5610 laptop and its rock solid, its running the 2.6.31-14-generic kernel without me doing anything, ATI graphics (with the restricted driver) are fine, Intel wireless card is fine and the Intel audio is fine, and it even sees the HDMI port (not that I use it but it can see it now).

    Grub is fine, and from selecting the Unbutu option to working wireless connected desktop, including me selecting my user and entering my password is 56 seconds. Shut down is a gob smacking 6 seconds! I dont bother using Hibernate/suspend.

  111. Yeleek
    Linux

    Upgrading an os? Are you mad...

    'Who upgrades any O/S? All O/S makers say you can and maybe 10 years ago, with Win95 and DOS you could upgrade, but O/S these days has so many components, so much meta data the upgrades are complete tosh. Simply replacing some components in the middle of a working O/S, do me a favour!' - Exactly.

    Linux (Ubuntu) is free people, it does work, just need to put a bit of effort in. And be glad you aren't a windows user so don't have to worry about nasties like Conficker....

  112. Efros
    Paris Hilton

    1 out of 3

    Only had 1 trashed system out of 3 upgraded, the other 2 work perfectly. The 3rd well it got W7 installed, needed it up and running fast and a 30 minute install appealed versus a 3 hour fight.

    Paris cos... who knows why just cos.

  113. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Worked for me

    My wifi used to take ages to connect, now it works instantly. I upgraded two dell laptops, and aside from the download time, they went off without a hitch. Its nice to have Firefox 3.5 by default, but other than that, i didn't notice much.

  114. muriwo

    Successful install on Acer Travelmate

    I have long since given up trying to do the "semi-automatic" upgrades from one Ubuntu to another, they always shaft something up.

    Therefore I did a clean install of Ubuntu on a spare partition on my secondary PC, an old (2007) Acer Travelmate and it went fine. No major issue and one minor one (drivers for playing videos), which the default movie player managed to automatically fix for me by suggesting and downloading the missing drivers. It picked up my wireless network and autodetected the security-type in 3s flat, better than previous Ubuntus and MUCH better than Vista.

    So far I am very pleased with it, and my wife (who is NOT a techie and normally uses this PC) is also happy.

    Please note that I used the ALTERNATE installer which I agree is not SO user-friendly. However it is about the same as the Windows XP installer.

    Cameron Smith, Maputo, Mozambique

  115. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's about time...

    ... for a penguin with horns and a penguin with a halo in the icon options...

  116. Rogier de Groot
    Dead Vulture

    No problems here

    I've been running Karmic since the fifth beta and have not encountered any serious issues. I call bullshit on the sensationalist crap.

  117. James Dunmore
    Go

    No problems

    On a Dell XPS 1530 laptop, and a dell precision Desktop - both upgrades, both went 100% without a problem (other than spotify no working!)

  118. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Google news pawnage

    It is highly uncommon for El Reg to post such a scathing review of a Linux distro, but now that it's happened this story is topping the Google news Science/Tech category and overriding the (numerous) better reviews that 9.10 has gotten.

    Ironic, isn't it? It's only perpetuating the myth that "Linux sucks, don't use it; use Windows''. Talk about digging a deeper hole for yourself.

    FAIL, because this article is doing some real and possibly unnecessary damage to desktop Linux's reputation.

  119. Hub
    Pint

    Should be getting back to work now

    To be awkward, I'm going to report no problems and for the first time in years I can actually make the ATI drivers install fine - clean installs on a few different machines.

    Other than the shite habbit of mounting my encrypted drives, which I'll hack out later and is not exactly a bug as such, I've had no problems SO FAR. Even the default theme isn't half as vile as usual. That cloud storage thing isn't exactly smoothly done though, but again, I'll live

    A pint icon for those suffering. Go back to 9.04 and wait a few weeks, you'll know it'll turn good in the end :)

  120. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Three Installs, Almost Flawless

    So far, I've installed to a USB stick (as a permanent install), a desktop and a laptop. Oddly, the USB is the most successful of the three, running on about 6 different makes of computer almost flawlessly (and enticing the odd newbie to give Ubuntu a try). The Desktop had a couple of glitches installing, but that was my fault: I was downloading variants of the ISOs while upgrading and it kinda ran out of space... apt-get update and apt-get upgrade fixed any problems, though! The laptop -- well, it's a Toshiba A70 and everything has been hit and miss ever since I took possession of it (including it's early day when it ran Windows XP Pro). Suspend/resume and hibernation are the only real issues I've found. As with previous Linux installs, I've just disabled the whole works and everything works fine now.

  121. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Surely this is irrelevant in the global scheme of things?

    In order to get real acceptance and market share the important thing is to have a product that works out of the box (for home users) and as part of an imaging process (corporate users).

    Home users will just buy a computer with an OS and expect it to work. They are unlikely to change the OS until they buy a new computer, which they will again expect to work out of the box.

    Corporate users will have a small number of different models of computers (especially as it is likely any OS change would be done as part of a desktop refresh) so as long as they work then everyone is happy. And the desktop techies are paid to make sure it does work.

    I don't have any facts and figures on the number of people who ever actually upgrade their OS but I am willing to hazard a guess that it is a very low percentage of computer users - and usually the more technical amongst us who have already made up our minds as to what the future should be.

    It is, however, amusing to see the freetard vs. paytard handbag fights mirror each other in the "upgrading to Windows 7 is crap" and the "upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 is crap" comments.

  122. HollyHopDrive
    Linux

    @anonymous coward - hahaha

    "I work for MS and this article made me chuckle. You get what you pay for and all that........."

    Yes, and that's the point. I didn't pay for it. People are having a slight moan about something which has traditionally been one fantastic release after another fantastic release. People would have been more than a little peeved if they'd shelled out £100+ for a copy of Win7.

    I've installed it (clean) on a Toshiba NB100. Wireless doesn't work properly but other than that its perfect. In fact, I installed both full and netbook remix versions (which is beautiful BTW). Installed via a USB stick (can windows do that...er..no) in less than 20 mins (can windows do that ... er no).

    The other thing is that I would imagine that its all going to be fixed quick smart. No waiting 6 months for a service pack!

    So take all that and stick it in your MS pipe and smoke it. (or do you need a paperclip and a 'wizard' pop up to help you).

    Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now......

  123. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Ease of Windows install?

    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.

  124. Al 14

    Not that good

    SMDB now crashes randomly, and they *still* haven't fixed the known performance issue that makes maximizing or make a window bigger take 1-2 seconds when using compositing window manager.. :-(

  125. Andrew 13
    Pint

    I like it as much as beer

    Been using it since Thursday - fresh install on my Thinkpad X60s. I like it as much as beer. But for joe public, I'd recommend always waiting for the LTS version. That's what my wife, mum, dad,sister and parents in law are using now - only issue is wireless support is flaky for my sister's laptop, and that should be fixed by the new LTS version in April.

  126. handle

    Acer Aspire A110; reason to REPLACE rather than UPGRADE

    Jez Caudle: I've found a couple of annoyances with the Aspire One A110 so far:

    1) The "home" key is no longer functional - apparently its mapping caused problems on some other hardware so they've remapped it, breaking it on the Aspire One (and rendering it unavailable in the shortcuts app).

    2) You can't turn the touch pad off any more - only "while typing"! Which idiot decided to take that ability away? For non-savvy computer users who use a mouse, enabling the touchpad is a menace.

    And no, it hasn't got rid of all the lag - wait until you've played with Firefox or OpenOffice for a bit! It may be better than 9.04 but I don't have experience of that on an A110.

    I've also been using a Dell Mini 10v with an external monitor and that confuses it too - you can end up with the "task bar" on the internal screen and everything else on the external one!

    Debating whether or not to replace the OEM LTR on a Toshiba NB100.

    Anyway, I don't think anyone's yet mentioned that if you upgrade you don't get the full benefits of reformatting with the ext4 file system; that's why I replaced and it looks like I've avoided some pain by doing so.

  127. amani

    Wrong Statistics?

    "Only around 10 per cent of those upgrading or installing reported a completely flawless experience" is totally wrong (at least now). It is over 24%. I think most people without problems do not bother to go to the forums.

    Kubuntu-9.10 installed flawlessly on ACER4520

  128. David Janda
    Thumb Down

    Sucks on the PlayStation 3

    Ages to do a clean install and to be greated with an error message saying cannot find rootfs !

    Did an upgrade prior and the age old issue of WPA2 wireless problems was still there.

    Off to do a Yellow Dog install.

  129. Chronos
    FAIL

    POLA...

    ...I'm sure they've heard of it.

  130. Alfonso Garcia-Patiño Barbolani
    FAIL

    Mixed results so far

    Ubuntu 9.10 on Acer A150, clean install -> flawless

    KUbuntu 9.10 on homemade desktop (that was running 9.04 fine), upgrade -> aborted in the middle of the upgrade with a message saying that kdesudo crashed.

    The upgrade window went blank and I forced the window close. Now, being an old time upgrader, I knew that the worst thing I could do was reboot. I first killed all running processes related to the upgrade and ran sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. I got a message saying that I had to run dpkg --configure -a as there were things not consistent.

    Did that, after a while it finished, rebooted and now I'm posting this from my happily running upgraded 9.10. And finally Amarok has regained its iPod abilities lost in the 2.0 upgrade.

    Upgrading to Koala is not something for grandma, certainly. One of Ubuntu's strongest points was its ability to upgraded without disruption. This heritage has been lost, unless Debian upgrades are also so traumatic these days.

  131. sandman

    @HollyHopDrive

    Actually, Windows users have plenty of time to smoke whatever takes their fancy while watching the Linux users struggle to install their funny little animals. Some may even use the paperclip to hold a roach.

  132. Tony Green
    Thumb Down

    Totally unusable for me

    I'm sure the idea behind Upstart is a good one. But not such a good idea is the fact that it doesn't bother waiting until I've had chance to type in the passphrase for my LUKS encrypted /home filesystem before starting everything and ensuring I can't type it in.

    That's at least the third release of Ubuntu I've had to revert to my backups from because it's unusable. Time for a new distro, I think...

  133. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    No problems here

    No problems here. Everything good :)

  134. Uwe Dippel
    FAIL

    Been there done it - No good

    But: I filed a number of bug reports. Fortunately, here we had only minor inconveniences, but a lot. Wait until everyone has their kernels fixed, and graphics coming up. Suddenly then, things will start to look strange. There are problems with mount, brasero (CD-burner), screensaver, synaptic.

    Have fun!

    No, the year of the desktop, this is not. Not on Ubuntu.

  135. Brutus
    Thumb Up

    Worked for me

    But then I just let the upgrade manager take strain, hit the default option a couple of times for something or other and there we go!

  136. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Karmic is Canonical's Vista.

    I admit to being a total Ubuntu fanboy since '06. Every new release brings a few problems, but there's never been anything show-stopping. Until now.

    I've tried this mess (GOD, I've tried!) on 5 PCs, 3 netbooks, and 3 laptops - machines ranging from not-so-old to not-so-new. It works OK on 2 of the PCs. That's all.

    And even there, it must win the prize for the ugliest, UGLIEST login screen of any distribution of all time. And thanks to the massive amount of dumbing down in this release, there's no longer an option to replace it with something prettier.

    Horrible, Horrible. I've loved Ubuntu PASSIONATELY for years, but now it's time to get a divorce and start looking elsewhere.

  137. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    No (real) problems...

    Had problems with HD recognition, took all of 2 minutes to work-out how to disable dmraid and install.

    Had problems with a popping sound card, took all of 1 minute to research and fix (disabled timeout setting).

    Had problems with Wireless network encryption (WPA didn't work) took all of 3 minutes to research and fix.

    Why are so many bitching rather than getting off their backsides and doing some basic research?

  138. BrentRBrian
    Unhappy

    All smooth here

    On my 4 machines it went well ... poor bloke behind me must have taken it hard ...

  139. Andus McCoatover
    Grenade

    Now I understand why there's two groups having problems...

    Easy! Mr. Koala has two penises, and Mrs. Koala has 2 vaginas.

    You're all - ahem - barking up the wrong tree!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koala, and search "bifurcated" on the page. Oh, and if you're having problems with the speed of the thing, see piccie on the right of that resulting search statement. "Koalas have a slow metabolism and sleep for most of the day". Royal Mail postie, eat-yer-heart-out.

    OK, I'm going now. Sodding Koalas. Making me jealous.

  140. Graham Hawkins

    Mostly OK...

    Clean 9.10 UNR on AAO worked well. Some nice UI improvements over 9.04.

    Clean 9.10 Kubuntu on desktop failed to setup display resolution properly. Solved with backed-up xorg.conf from 9.04. kblutooth is crap as per https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192238. New KDE doesn't seem to have crashed as often as the last KDE PoS.

  141. Robert Pogson
    Happy

    Glad To See So Many Posts

    It means Ubuntu had lots of installations.

    Mine was pretty smooth except my virtual machine did not have a virtual monitor so X was stuck in 800x600 by default. Supplied an /etc/X11/xorg.conf and it is beautiful. No other problems. Writing a book with LyX at the moment. Very nice.

  142. yomchi86
    Thumb Up

    Linux Magic

    Downloaded and installed it about 30 mins after it was available on the website. Installed it to a clean partition on my hard drive. No problems whatsoever for me :) Dead chuffed, found all of my hardware and everything works as it should. If anyone is getting issues, I would strongly suggest bearing with it. Yes you may be having problems but remember this is completely FREE, no nasty licences, completely open source so I personally believe that a bit of teething trouble at the start is no reason to shy away from Ubuntu :) Microsoft sucks lol.

  143. Andus McCoatover
    Unhappy

    @AC 11:46

    Huh??????

    [And even there, it must win the prize for the ugliest, UGLIEST login screen of any distribution of all time. And thanks to the massive amount of dumbing down in this release, there's no longer an option to replace it with something prettier.]

    I think (I'm on a winders box at the moment, so can't test - but..) somewhere in "preferences" you can get a nice picture of roses. Or download your own. Whatever. Penises. Paris, even. (Yuck!). Floats my boat.

    Just play for a few minutes, FFS. but not in the sandpit (sand creates havoc with keyboards). Get a fuc*king grip, man. I'll lend you my mensa card for a fiver. If it'll help. Which it won't.

  144. John Sanders
    Pint

    Separate partition for /home is the key

    I did a clean install on two laptops, an Thinkpad X40 and a Thinkpad T43.

    Of the two the only one that gave me any issue was the X40, the X40 LCD doesn´t lit again after coming back from standby, (I have not research the issue yet) but besides that, the X40 which is slow by modern standards literally flies compared to running WindowsXP.

    The Thinkpad T43 has no issue at all, and it feels unnaturally fast. (Jaunty used to run like dog poo on the Thinkpad T43 compared to Karmic)

    Long ago I got the suggestion of creating a separate partition for the /home dir, I did so, and doing a clean reinstall was considerably painless this time. After booting up all my settings were as I left them when I was using Jaunty, only the fonts looked a bit different because I was using the ones in the ttf-liberation package and obviously were missing on a clean reinstall.

    My advice is: Do a clean reinstall if you can before throwing the towel.

    So far this is the most polished Linux distro I have ever run on any computer.

  145. desht
    Thumb Up

    Fine here

    Installed 9.10 on four very different machines (AMD/Nivida gaming rig, Atom-powered netbook, Atom-powered media PC, Intel-powered corporate PC). Problems encountered: zero.

    (OK, one problem: on the netbook, Xorg got the physical screen size wrong, but that was the case in 9.04 too. Fixed by adding an xrandr command in the startup)

    Also booted the live CD on a Lenovo laptop and it works fine (even running dual screen), but I haven't installed it on that yet.

  146. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Ubuntu 9.10

    I did a fresh installation of Ubuntu 9.10 and it works flawlessly, the only slight hiccup is a slower boot time of that than Jaunty.

  147. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    hmmmm

    I went for ubuntu 9.10 because win 7 failed epically. Neither are perfect.

    Ubuntu won't let you set a static IP without manually editing the interfaces file and the stupid nvidia driver won't go to proper res automatically.

    But Win 7 doesn't share files properly, the Marvell LAN driver didn't work at all until the 2nd update, then not anywhere near what XP did enough until the 3rd. The gfx drivers never worked properly after 7 attempts at various win update and direct NVidia driver dwnloads

    neither are ready for mass consumer desktop IMHO.

    but I stuck with Ubuntu and happy I did because sharing works and it's fast and spiffy.

  148. This post has been deleted by its author

  149. Andrew Yeomans
    Gates Halo

    Windows the success it is among regular PC users?

    Google currently has 21,200 references to the search "windows 7" "installation problems", but only 802 references to "ubuntu 9.10" "installation problems". [And altering the quotes or giving alternative strings also has Win7 outnumbering Ubuntu every time.]

    Does this prove Windows 7 is harder to install than Ubuntu 9.10? Probably not, you really need to know the number of people trying to install either system.

    But it does strongly suggest that the article is poorly researched and biased.

  150. Nigel Callaghan
    Thumb Up

    Another happy camper

    Been running 9.04 for some months without any serious problems, really just trying it all out. Let update manager upgrade to 9.10 yesterday, pretty smooth. Only problem is that it seems to have lost the scanner driver for my networked brother multi-function. I'll re-install when I have a moment.

    And having spent most of a day over the weekend trying to initially repair an XP machine that had been trojaned, followed by a complete re-install when the repair didn't clear it up, total of probably a dozen or more re-boots....I think I know which one I prefer!

    Current main development machine (XP) is coming to the end of its life, and I think when I get a new box it'll be Ubuntu with XP/Win 7 just for testing.

  151. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ! "Technical users"

    "Typically, it's the more technical users overall who install Ubuntu"

    I disagree with that. Most of the time, *buntu is choosed by the _LESS_ technical or technically inclined. And it shows.

  152. Sureo
    Happy

    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.

  153. Jimmyfj
    Thumb Down

    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.

  154. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not All Aspire One's install 9.10 perfectly

    If you're really unlucky a small number with the stock SSD and much larger proportion who have upgraded their SSD to faster ones you could get struck down with the SSD Stall Bug which means Karmic takes up to 3 minutes to boot and multiple reboots and/or restarting GDM are needed to get it up and running properly.

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/445852

    Some of us will have to stick with Jaunty till Karmic SP1 comes out - something I'm far more used to happening when Redmond rushes things!

  155. John O'Mary
    Grenade

    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!

  156. Kevin Hutchinson
    Thumb Up

    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

  157. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not soon enough

    It's not a case of waiting, I think people should have upgraded sooner. I upgraded several machines to Alpha 6 or Beta and had no problems at all.

  158. MarkOne
    Stop

    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.

  159. Gareth Bult 1

    Is Karmic crap because it's crap, or because we want to promote Windows 7?

    Mmm, all of a sudden the Register believes everything it reads! I've done 10 clean installs, no problem and upgraded 5 diverse machines no problem. In particular, this workstation is a Phenom II X4 with an Nvidia Quad with 4 screens running Xinerama, 3 x 1Tb SATA's on a RAID3, with 10 VM's running under KVM .. it boots off LVM / RAID3 .. I guess you could get a more complex box but it's up there as a workstation designed to break an upgrade procedure.

    (Oh, and it's part of a redhat cman cluster setup..)

    Not only did the upgrade not break anything or make the screen go fuzzy, it's the FIRST major upgrade I've done on Ubuntu which hasn't reduced the system to 1 screen and made me reconfigure the NVidia driver to get my 4-screen view back.

    Canonical have a lot to be worried about, but I don't think the 9.10 install / upgrade is going to be one of them .. I just tried Fedora 11, doesn't really compare ..

  160. SynnerCal
    Paris Hilton

    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-.

  161. John F***ing Stepp

    Well.

    I have actually found that Debian installs much easier than this somewhat illegitimate child; but then I have used Windows forever and even got ME to work fine.

    If I were going to complain about Ubuntu I would go for the throat.

    Free systems are for the cheap (like me); support dialup* you useless wastes of keyboard input.

    *Try it, just try to change the damn modem speed.

  162. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    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.

  163. abigsmurf

    @Andrew Yeomans

    Windows 7 has 3-4 times the installed (desktop) user base of Linux as a whole. You've then got to narrow that figure down to people who have Ubuntu THEN you've got to narrow it down further to people who have upgraded.

    Not to mention that people have been installing and upgrading to Windows 7 for months so they've had a lot more time to ask help for these problems and the fact that Windows 7 users on average are less techie and more likely to need to ask for help.

  164. Sid James
    Stop

    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.

  165. James Hughes 1

    Seems to be mainly graphics cards that are the problem?

    I have had problems with Nvidia on my old old card every kernel upgrade. Judging by net searches I was in the minority. Now it seems I'm in the majority!! Hurrah. Perhaps it means the problem I keep seeing will get fixed.

    Anyway, reinstallation of Nvidia fixed the screen problem, had a dependency problem with Lives which was breaking the Software Centre, now its seemingly working OK. Does seem faster than before. Don't like the Login screen, but otherwise seems much the same as before.

    Not ready for the average user yet to upgrade, although installing on parents PC to see how they get on! I can always VNC in to fix it.

    Will be cautious next time I upgrade, but will stick with Ubuntu - it does all that I want, and it's free!

  166. The BigYin

    What I may do...

    ...in a month or so (once my gubbered drive comes back from WD) is back-up /home and then flatten this puppy so I can go to ext4.

    Should be faster, should pick-up any fixes as well.

    Or maybe I'd best leave it alone....

  167. copsewood
    Linux

    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.

  168. Robert Hill
    FAIL

    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?!?!?!?

  169. Robert E A Harvey

    @sed gawk

    Thanks for the audio tips. My dual-audio-card setup is broken *again* like after the 9.04 upgrade. When I understand what you have written, I'll have a go.

  170. Waderider
    Linux

    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.........

  171. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    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!

  172. Fred 24

    Utter shyte!

    All working here!

    The main differences I see are the faster boot times and snappier response in Firefox.

    The things that remain the same are the FUD template as displayed in the comments above.

  173. vegister
    Thumb Up

    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?

  174. William Gallafent
    Boffin

    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.

  175. peter garner
    Headmaster

    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..

  176. Connor
    Linux

    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.

  177. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    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".

  178. Iain 34
    Go

    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.

  179. sanjayayogi

    Karmic remix working on Lenovo s-10

    I started with the RC and having been keeping the updates current. No major problems, all in all a good release for my netbook. Battery life is significantly improved, boot and shutdown times are dramatically improved. I am averaging ~200 MB ram, for basic installation, and 180 MB with openbox. All in all, I like it.

    As usual, new releases come with hiccups, and require a little patience, I am sure it is temporary problems, as Ubuntu has a good history of getting things right.

  180. Steven Raith

    No [real] problems here

    Menagerie = Toshiba Tecra A2, Acer Aspire One A150 [8gb Jmicron SSD with legendary controller problems] and a self build based around a P5Q/Q6600/HD4850

    Tecra:

    This machine was running 9.04 but I borked it trying to get it to connect to a 1080p monitor. Was planning on fixing it about nine months ago, but built the P5Q machine, which was quiet enough to be used as a main box, so ignored it till a few days ago.

    As the DVDROM doesn't boot [hardware issue] and it doesn't support USB device boots, I TFTP'd it over from a Windows PXE boot client [the *wonderful* TFTPD32.exe - well worth having]. Boot from LAN, choose to install using the alternate install media, give it my details, nuke and pave, nuke and pave. Went out for a bit, came back an hour later to a fully funcitonal laptop. Only *actual* problems are scratchy sound on Startup which disappears as soon as you login, and the 'media/Fn' keys aren't mapped. But as my bro [completely non-technical when it comes to computers] is using it as a web browsing machine, that doesn't matter. Otherwise, it's zippy, clean and works fine.

    Acer Aspire One A150:

    This machine has been the bane of my life the last month since I moved up here, and have had the main box in my bedroom - I've been using it with XP with all the SSD workarounds [FAT32, no page file, etc] and it was slow, painful to use, and just wound me up solid, even when just browsing the web. So whapped a USB key into the A2, built a USB Boot drive, stuck it in the Acer and booted the Live image. Bloody hell, everything, even the wireless, works out the box. Installed it alongside my XP install [which I still use for stuff like Nokia PC Suite etc], let it do it's thing, reboot.

    Grub gives me the XP option, as expected, boots up pretty zippily given the SSD is barely capable of 30MB/sec, and thanks to Debian being rather better at running mostly in RAM than Windows, the catching/stalling caused by the atrocious, hateful JMicron SSD controller is far less of a problem - I actually like to use this machine now. Bar the aforementioned SSD, it's all just sweet, streams SD video over wifi [HD is pushing it a bit in terms of bandwidth and the intel GMAs OpenGL pushing abilities], it just does the job nicely. Hell, even Compiz runs along at a reasonable clip.

    P5Q box: I tried 9.04 on it when I built it, but if it can't support the full hardware of the GPU [HD4850] then it's a bit of a waste. Windows 7 64bit is runnning sweetly on there at the moment anyway, and having a chunky Windows box around the house has it's uses. I'll probably back up the big PC when my Beta/RC trial of 7 runs out, and throw 9.10 on it and see how it's come along in terms of ATI support by then.

    The only real issue other than hotkeys I have found is that Terminal Server client doesn't seem to like resolving DNS names on the local network - but I think that's down to my network, rather than TS Client.

    Basically, no issues here; although I have to agree that taking a poll from a website people go to when they have problems as gospel is at best niave, and at worst, just plain bad journalism - someone should have thought of that really IMHO but then, it's only journalism - which is generally trumped by personal experience in my books.

    Steven R

  181. Tim Croydon
    Unhappy

    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.

  182. BenDwire Silver badge
    Boffin

    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.

  183. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Value for Money.

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

  184. Dexter
    Thumb Up

    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.

  185. Herbert Meyer
    Linux

    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.

  186. Karmic Install

    Karmic not so bad, but...

    I just moved from Jackalope to Koala and it reasonably works for me, but the migration could be a nightmare for a Linux newbie. So:

    - 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);

    - I avoided the new ext4 filesystem (that is now the default);

    - I throwed away the ugly and regressive gdm login interface, and installed the kdm one, then manually edited the kdm config file.

    Such hacks are horrors for the real end user. The result looks cool, but one get it through a Debian-like way.

  187. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    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!)

  188. Drak

    Shuttleworth spends $30 million to float in space, but cant 'afford' to hire compitent programmers

    Can we stop running hype storys on Ubuntu already? If Shuttleworth was just another hobbiest making a distro in his living room in his spare time, then I could forgive all these glitches. But he has the money to assemble professional talent but instead heads a band of amateur freetards. 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.

  189. DavidK
    Linux

    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.

  190. This post has been deleted by its author

  191. Joe Futrelle
    FAIL

    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.

  192. dshan

    KK 9.10 Install

    I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Inspiron 1300 over the weekend, straight after a fresh install of Win 7 on the same machine. Ubuntu install was *much* more straightforward than Win 7, I spent hours searching the Dell and Intel sites looking for and downloading the latest Windows video, WiFi and touchpad drivers for the Dell as out of the box they weren't supported by the Borg's latest bastard child. Eventually got it working using old XP/2000 drivers as there are no Vista/Win 7 drivers available for this hardware. It doesn't support Aero of course but it runs, albeit slowly.

    Ubuntu 9.10 on same the hardware installed smoothly and it recognized all hardware out of the box. The only issue was some initial issues getting it to connect to my WPA2 WiFi network, aside from that it was probably the smoothest Ubuntu install I've ever done (WiFi drivers used to be a big problem with Ubuntu, but not any more).

    As a rule I don't do upgrades of either Windows or Linux installs, they are often more trouble than they're worth. Only Apple seems to be able to write proper reliable OS upgrades, the others really need a fresh install each time (and sometimes even then you still have problems).

    MS of course deliberately makes upgrades unattractive both economically and technically because they need to drive new hardware sales to satisfy their partners, who are their real customers. Ubuntu is getting better but their upgrades are still not up to snuff, usually they sort of work but leave certain apps not loading or crashing on startup or something like that.

  193. Bill_in_the-US

    Piece of Cake

    I upgraded my Acer Aspire One netbook from 9.04 to 9.10 without a hitch. My only (minor) quibble is that the UNR interface is gone. I loved that in 9.04

    Otherwise, flawless.

  194. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    @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.

  195. Captain Thyratron
    Coat

    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.)

  196. Reverend Brown
    Linux

    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.

  197. Adrian Challinor
    Linux

    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.

  198. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    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).

  199. Iain B. Findleton

    Ubuntu 9.10

    My own experience doing an upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 on an HP tx2000 has been a pleasant experience. The only quasi-complaint I might voice is that the downloading of the upgrade packages took quite a while, however I presume that this was a load issue on the servers.

    I was somewhat worried with the upgrade as I had had difficult issues with previous upgrade releases that failed or crashed, leaving some of my machines in need of clean installs from the CD. With 9.10, however, the process went smoothly and a reboot brought up 9.10 cleanly. Surprisingly, my touch screen worked out of the box, something I have been struggling with for some time with previous releases.

    I think the new art work is a bit of a retrograde contribution, but everything else works fine, no crashes or freezes, nice new look, better fonts, clean experience.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_up_32.png

  200. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Video bugs

    @O/S Upgrades never work!

    Yeah they do. Ubuntu for one has every package tracked by a package manager, so every OS-related file is owned by one package or another. UNIX semantics mean any file that is open (apps that are being run, resource files used by applications, etc.) is kept on disk until closed, so deleting an open file you're not yanking files out from under running applications either. Result? Upgrades that don't blow up. Most upgrade problems people are mentioning are because 9.10 isn't working for them -- not due to the upgrade, a clean 9.10 would give them the same problems. As another person says, Solaris upgrades are fine. OSX upgrades are fine. It's *just* Windows that doesn't keep track of anything and ends up with messy upgrades.

    So, I haven't tried 9.10 yet, but this is very unfortunate. The root of the problem I think is they put in quite a few new video drivers, and since they stick strictly to a date-based release instead of when it's more or less done, they end up with problems like this. I usually wait a month to go to the next version. Although for those of you who DO have problems, don't worry, as long as your box is currently usable (even if buggy) there's usually updates DAILY after a release to start nailing down bugs. And, it's getting old, but if you want the best stability I would use an LTS (Long Term Support) version, 8.04.2 is the current one, and 10.04 should come out April 2010.

  201. Fewt
    FAIL

    I call it Winkarmic ME

    Finally, all the awesomeness of Windows ME has been ported to Ubuntu.

    Quality control at its finest. I can't wait until people really start having problems. Perhaps this will be the one that forces them to finally implement quality control.

  202. SilverWave
    Happy

    GDM Login Screen

    @Drak priceless simply priceless <crying with laughter>

    @@AC 11:46 here you go... (Googled not tested yet)

    Hack Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic koala) GDM Login Screen <http://lionlix.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/hack-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala-gdm-login-screen/>

  203. Saucerhead Tharpe
    Linux

    No problems here ecktually

    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

  204. Titon1512
    Thumb Up

    Two Installs of Ubuntu 9.10 - No Issues

    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.

  205. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Mixed results...

    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...

  206. SilverWave
    Boffin

    Compare Karmic release with other releases based on this poll

    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.

  207. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Installed on Parallels OK but no tools support

    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.

  208. John Fielder
    Headmaster

    acer aspire one

    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

  209. Zack Mollusc
    Happy

    my tale

    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 ).

  210. nsld
    Paris Hilton

    mixed results

    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

  211. Archie The Albatross
    Boffin

    Kalm Koala

    Upgraded from Jaunty on my (quite old) Dell laptop with not even the vaguest hint of a problem.

    Hope the rest of you find out how good it can be really soon!

  212. Adam Williamson 1

    Some notes

    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.

  213. Gert Selkobi
    Thumb Up

    No problems here.

    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.

  214. Havin_it

    Not so bad (in perspective)

    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!

  215. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    M$ agents infiltrated here

    @ Anonymous Coward

    How much did M$ pay you?

    Troll Alert!!!

  216. william henderson 1
    FAIL

    maybe...John Lawton

    "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.

  217. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    @Robert E A Harvey

    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

  218. Herby

    What Me Worry?

    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).

  219. Alfonso Garcia-Patiño Barbolani
    Happy

    Another flawless upgrade

    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

  220. Tom Maddox Silver badge
    Gates Halo

    So, let's recap the fanboi comments

    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.

  221. Paul Woodhouse

    I'm loving 9.10

    went the backup settings to pen drive and then clean install route here... no issues at all, loving it... 3 or 4 year old Dell Dimension machine, 1st time I've ever installed a Linux OS where everything just worked straight off the install.

  222. Andrew Punch
    Go

    No problems here

    Upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on a T400 laptop using the graphical upgrade - no problems.

  223. Evil
    Linux

    Updated 5 systems here - no probs.

    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.

  224. Torquemada28
    FAIL

    Bad joke, maybe.

    @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.

  225. Robert Halloran
    Linux

    99% Just Worked

    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.

  226. Adam Williamson 1
    Thumb Down

    Tom Maddox:

    Nice cherry-picking, there. Actually the sanity:foaming-at-the-mouth ratio in the comments looks about 70:30 to me, which isn't bad for any internet comment thread, let alone one about operating systems.

  227. unimaginative
    Linux

    Is there such a thing as a smooth OS upgrade

    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.

  228. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

    Damn, but it's good to own a Mac.

  229. A.Lizard

    Karmic? Got it, works great with minor issues.

    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.

  230. Indian-Art
    Alien

    Title is very misleading & biased

    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"

  231. The PC Magician
    Linux

    Always do a clean install !

    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.

  232. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    I am back to 9.04

    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

  233. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Postive Karma on Karmic Koala

    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.

  234. Fluffykins Silver badge

    Me too

    Installation on Tosh Sat Pro 4600 (Yeah, THAT old) failed to the Black Screen of Indifference. (BSI)

  235. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Tom Maddox

    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.

  236. SynnerCal
    Thumb Down

    Being unfair

    @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.

  237. SilverWave
    Linux

    Charisma envy? ;)

    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 :)

  238. DutchP
    Thumb Up

    Some issues and some RTFM

    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.

  239. rabidbadger

    @SilverWave

    > 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...]

  240. Grease Monkey Silver badge

    Finally

    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?

  241. Tony Rogers
    Flame

    Extra App Required

    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.

  242. motoki1

    Dell Mini9

    The update fixed the touchpad on my Dell Mini9. It used to jump all over the place when clicking, and now it's working perfectly.

  243. Gaz Davidson

    @Koala Brains

    Mystic Mekon?

  244. Harmless Drudge

    No problems here

    I took the precaution of doing a clean install. Had no problems at all.

  245. jac2
    Unhappy

    Live CD and Windows Software RAID 1

    I had to rebuild my RAID 1 array after using 9.10 Live CD. It took 3 hours. It seems the safe banking is a no go with Karmic Koala

  246. Emo
    Thumb Up

    No problems here

    Dual overclocked P3's @ ~1.25ghz on a VP6 motherboard, nvidia card, upgraded over the years from 8.04 to 9.10 - no probs, works flawlessly and looks awesome :)

  247. Quirkafleeg
    Grenade

    Re: Mixed Results here,

    '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…

  248. JustJoeKing
    Alien

    Flickering screen - quick fix

    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.

  249. Adam Williamson 1

    Silverwave

    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.

  250. Bernie 2
    Linux

    Installed 9.10 last night

    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.

  251. miguelmonkeyman
    Thumb Down

    spotify

    I'm pretty much the least technically minded user of ubuntu I know and so pretty representative of the kind of people the linux community should want to convert, and the one thing that really, really annoyed me was that spotify didn't work with the initial upgrade. It was a pretty simple fix - just upgraded to wine 1.2 - but isn't this the sort of thing that should have already worked anyway?

    Spotify is the coolest thing on the internet right now and just about everyone I know uses it, yet somehow the fact that it didn't work on 9.10 passed the developers by? I'm sure lots of developers will whine on about how spotify 'isn't open source so they don't care for it' or whatever, but frankly, millions and millions of your potential users do like it and want to use it.

    Sorry, bit of an incoherent rant there.

  252. Coyote

    agreed, 9.10 reeks of eucalyptus

    - Clean install on a Dell Inspiron 14. Wifi doesn't work. Well, the wifi works as far as the interface coming up and scanning, but it won't associate with WPA networks. Haven't tried open or WEP. Other people with different wifi hardware are having the same problem, so i think it's a a higher-up kernel problem.

    - Speaking of, it was a pain in the ass to get the Broadcom STA drivers to load. The live-CD would show me the driver and let me activate it, but once karmic was installed to the machine the driver was absent. I had to manually install 3 .debs (patch, dkms, bcmwl-kernel-source) from the pool on the CD to get it back.

  253. Coyote

    Oh, let me just add...

    Everything worked just fine in 9.04.

  254. The BigYin

    @miguelmonkeyman

    Wine 1.2 (well, 1.1.32 to be exact) is not production stable, so is not included by Canonical. The fact that you want to use something that is not production stable (even according to WineHQ) is hardly Canonical's fault.

    If Linux gets better adoption, perhaps Spotify will do a Linux-specific product, meaning that you won't have to rely on unstable, developer versions of third-party software.

    And perhaps there will be a proper Pulseaudio equalizer so you can stop Spotify sounding like it's in a toilet.

    Yeah...and pigs may well indeed fly!

  255. SilverWave
    Linux

    You couldn't provide any proof in support of your allegations... could you?

    @By Adam Williamson 1

    OK I'll ask again, please provide links to support this allegation.

    #Previous#

    >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.

    I have never seen Ubuntu marketing say anything of the sort myself maybe you have some links to back this claim up?

    > 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, indeed you are allowed and encouraged to do this!

  256. Mike Gravgaard
    Megaphone

    Updated from 9.04 to 9.10

    I updated my mums and my PC to Ubuntu 9.10 from Ubuntu 9.04 without problems; though I'm thinking of rebuilding them from scratch as I would like ext4. Not sure about the default theme though.

    I've not seen these problems but I did once have a problem with Ubuntu 6.10 and put the problem down to VIA chipset kernel driver - it worked on 6.04 and 7.04 but not 6.10 but I wasn't to fussed as this PC had a terrorable chipset.

    Mike

  257. SilverWave
    Heart

    I love Redhat! why cant we all be friends?

    @ Adam Williamson 1

    No, no look...

    I love that Redhat is a big business and profitable.

    I also love that they are ethical and do the right thing.

    I would love Ubuntu to work it so they contribute more upstream.

    Its just that saying they use a lot of code contributed by others, as if this was a bad thing, is an odd position given that the GPL expressly allows this.

    Its also odd that you cant take a bit of good natured fun about "Charisma Envy".

    Also Canonical looks like its doing well to me, they are leveraging the whole GNU/Linux/Debian ecosystem to punch well above their weight.

    They also seem to have the "Cool" factor down.

    Whats not to like?

    It not a Win-Lose thing.

    If Redhat and Ubuntu do well its Win-Win.

    @ Adam Williamson 1 Posted Thursday 5th November 2009 06:51 GMT

    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?

  258. Time for a career change
    Thumb Up

    No problems here

    Did one upgrade, on a 3 year old Dell laptop, and a fresh install on a homebuilt PC sporting Gigabit mainboard, Nvidia graphics card, two SATAs.

    No problems on either box, and got the 2.6.31 kernel.

  259. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Akoya - MSI Wind Upgrade

    I have had a fully functioning 9.04 UNRemix version running well for some time on my Medion Akoya (MSI Wind rebadge).

    I pressed the upgrade button and let it do its stuff.

    The local ubuntu mirror server (DK) was broken and died during download every time. A trip to the Ubuntu forum gave me the clue how to point somewhere else.

    I let the upgrade run, but a couple of hours in it went into some sort of error loop, popping up blank error message boxes all over the place. I left it running. The day after, the machine was frozen on a brown screen with a pointer, so I hit the big button.

    The new version came up because I pointed at it in the bootloader - wrong default. Then all sorts of weirdness happened. Firefox went into a crash loop, the window manager kept overwriting the little applets I have installed, and all manner of horrible things.

    I managed to get it to shut down gracefully, despite there apparent ly not being an button for this task.

    I rebooted. Even more (but less weirdness).

    I rebooted. Now it seemed to run just fine.

    I have since patched it with whatever else has been released.

    I like the new Remix look, and it clearly runs better than the last version which had some graphic chip issues. I have WiFi, but did not test BT yet since I lost my dongle. Cable Eth. works fine.

    Still testing, but generally I like it. WinXP is for the scrapheap now, and I will just dual boot with OSX or UNR.

    Dweeb

  260. Stephen Bungay
    Pint

    If it ain't broke...

    Don't replace it! Just because the shiny new toy is released is no reason to run to replace what you've got. Wait, have patience, if you simply must have the new toy then set it up in a virtual environment, or if you have an old PC hanging around install it there. Perhaps copy the hard disc you've got (DD) to another (empty) hard disc and try the upgrade without blowing away your system. These strategies might be overkill but you can save yourself a great deal of pain. After things like KDE 4.0 and the Xorg changes (seen in 9.04). Don't trust the new new releases, they contain too much revolution and not enough evolution, and they have a propensity to break what you had.

  261. miguelmonkeyman

    spotify

    re: spotify - fair enough with the unstable wine issues, I just think it strange that no-one developing 9.10 decided to work out a way to make spotify work.

    And the boot time is completely awful.

    And yes I know I can always ask for a refund :)

  262. Aaron 10
    Thumb Down

    ATI HD2400

    The Koala broke the video drivers. Even downloading and manually installing the correct drivers doesn't seem to work, even with a full uninstall of all the older ATI drivers.

  263. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Hibernation and swap - from release notes

    "If you intend to use hibernation with your system, you should ensure that the swap partition's size is at least as large as the system's physical RAM" according to 9.10 release notes.

    It is redundant to mention that, I suppose, because everyone else carefully read that document already. Right?

  264. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't have these problems and neither do

    the people I know who upgraded to 9.10.

    Don't know about those other guys, but I haven't had any problems with 3 PCs and one notebook. All ancient single-core one gig ram machines. Did an online update on one PC - no problem there either. In fact, I'm using it right now. Sure 9.10 is not without it's bugs. Overall, I would say 9.04 was more stable but I only started using 9.04 since August when it was already into 4 months of updates and bug fixes.

    Anyway, time will tell. So far, in the last week or so, I have been very happy with the updates from Canonical.

    It all just makes me suspect if MS had a hand in the reported bugs as it's pretty obvious they are feeling the heat of Linux and likely Ubuntu hot on their Windows heels, especially since it is really hot on the heels of the release of Win 7. Just think, if the news coming out about Karmic was overall good, wouldn't lots of people hold off and even cancel plans to get Win 7? The comment from a poster about running out to get a copy of Win 7 ... sheesh ... now doesn't that smell heavily of a big, big fish in the room?

  265. Adam Williamson 1

    SilverWave

    It's not using stuff from others that's the problem, of course not. It's using stuff from others but a) not contributing much back yourself and b) positioning yourself as 'the Linux'. It's not a question of this being specifically *stated* in Ubuntu's publicity, of course it's not that unsubtle, but if you look at Ubuntu's entire web site, or any of their major announcements, it's very very Ubuntu-is-it. They barely ever even mention the word Linux - they just talk about the 'Ubuntu operating system'. In a sense this positioning is smart, in that it reduces the debate among the wider public to 'Windows versus Mac versus Ubuntu', which is exactly what Ubuntu wants. But it's not healthy for the community in general.

  266. Quirkafleeg

    @Steven Raith (and other Toshiba laptop users)

    For little things such as media keys and Bluetooth, you probably need the "omnibook" module.

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=316358

  267. Ian Johnston Silver badge
    Linux

    Three out of four

    Fresh 9.10 NBR install on an original Eee 701: no problems.

    Online upgrade, 9.04 -> 9,10, Netvista with ATI graphics: no problems

    Online upgrade, 9.04 -> 9.10, Thinkpad X31: no problems

    CDROM upgrade, 9.04 -> 9.10, Thinkcentre with Nvidia graphics: problems.

    In the latter case, which is actually the one I did first, I got the widely reported Flickering Text Login Screen o' Doom. Having established that I could ssh into the machine without problems, and that the problem was therefore probably X, I edited xorg.conf to replace nvidia graphics with vesa, rebooted and got in fine.

    I then tried to install the Nvidia driver. Although it offered me bot v96 and v173, it would only actually install 96: any attempt to get 173 failed. Once 96 was installed and rebooted, 173 went in fine. Possibly something to do with a release note I discovered later saying an apt-get update (or equivalent) was necessary before installing nvidia drivers.

    Despite that, I think it's clear that they have screwed something up for nvidia users.

  268. Michael Schmidt
    Linux

    The silver lining

    The good news is that you can actually get good help on-line. The Ubuntu community is very supportive and responsive. I had slight difficulty with my 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade (actually fresh install). The LiveCD installer wouldn't detect the SATA HD - apparently this is a fairly frequent problem. The solution is to use the alternate, text-based install disk. Am now running 9.10 and my Ubuntu love is restored.

  269. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Worked for me 9.04 -> 9.10 beta -> 9.10

    Well, I had no issues...

  270. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Go Ubuntu

    "Who upgrades any O/S?" etc etc ad nauseum as some A/C above asked. Well I bloody do. mmmm Gentoo!

    All my Gentoo systems (around 45 and counting) starting from around 5 years ago are all running from the original. Most of them are now running the very latest stuff despite the sort of breakage that only Gentoo can introduce you to on a fairly regular basis followed by a fix that makes your eyes water. But that is what test systems are for.

    Upgrade snags. Pah. You can stick your monolithic upgrades. I'll take a little and often any day.

    Having said that, I hope the anecdotes posing as data resolve themselves and Ubuntu steams ahead successfully.

  271. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't beat them up too bad...

    Let me preface this - I am a Microsoft shill. I love windows 7.

    But please don't bash the Ubuntu team over this. All new releases can be a nightmare to get right and I'm sure they are working over time to fix these issues. I've used Ubuntu a few times and it is a very good linux product. I was impressed, even though my OS of choice is Windows. I still keep a laptop around with Ubuntu on it because it just runs nice and is stable. This is just a speed bump and every OS has one or two. hell, look at Vista. LOL

  272. Paul 129
    Linux

    Not so smooth after all

    The installation went fine, and things seemed to work ok, occasional hangs with bzflag, nothing much really. When I started to use it for machine cloning, I use ssh, netcat and other tools extensively it would lock up. The problem stemmed back to the r8169 kernel module. My net card comes up as an integrated 8168, which I thought was common as muck. The supplied r8169 driver is a complete dogs breakfast https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/448827 describes the problem to a tee. Be warned!

    Still love the system though

  273. Andus McCoatover
    Thumb Up

    IBM Thinkpad T30 update.

    Works a treat now. Think it was because I was using a pre-release. My bad. (256Meg RAM still OK)

    All machines now on 9.10 (Karmic) and are sweet.

  274. Andus McCoatover
    Thumb Down

    Now doesn't that smell heavily of a big, big fish in the room?

    I'll give you the recipe..BUT*..

    Ingredients:

    1 piece dried lute fish, sawed into 6 inch lengths

    2 tablespoons lye

    Directions:

    1. Soak the fish in clear water for 3 days.

    2. Add 2 tbsp lye into a gallon of water.

    3. Soak for 3 days in this solution.

    4. Then soak for 4 days in clear water, changing the water every day.

    5. Tie the fish loosly in a square of cheese cloth.

    6. Drop in a large enamel pot of boiling water.

    7. Cook 10 minutes or until well done.

    8. Remove cheese cloth put on a platter and debone.

    9. Serve with a white sauce or a mustard sauce.

    *The 'BUT' is - your house will smell like a dozen camels just pissed/shat/mated in it for the next - oh - century or so.

    Delicious? Yeah, right.

    (http://cookbook.rin.ru/cookbook_e/recipes/56350670.html)

  275. HoopyMcFrood
    Thumb Down

    Lots of problems with Huawei 3G dongles

    See here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/446146?comments=all

    From the comments it looks like they were made aware of this 2 weeks before release but did not put a fix in.

  276. philip.turpin
    Thumb Up

    Smooth install on a clean drive.

    Downloaded and installed 9.10 onto a fresh HDD on a few year old Tosh Equium laptop.

    Absolutely no problems at all - in fact the Avant Window Manager works on this release whereas it didn't on 9.04 (which is why I tried out the Win7 RC for a few months instead - something to do with incompatible graphics).

    I now have 9.10 running with VMWare installed with Win7 for those pgm's that I can't do without.

    Very happy with 9.10 &, it could just be me but, I do think it's noticeably quicker. Sorry to hear that so many others are having problems.

  277. HobbleAlong

    N/A

    Nicest blood I've ever been 'bloodied' by. My experience has been the complete opposite of your article; are you referring to the beta? I experienced problems right up to the Release Candidate, but the final release has been completely flawless. I've been using Ubuntu since Feisty Fawn and for me Karmic is far and away the best release so far! *Everything* just worked. So far I have installed both 32 bit and 64 bit Desktop versions, and 64 bit Server. Zero problems.

  278. HobbleAlong
    FAIL

    Re: Never Got That Far -

    The first comment; referring to a 17 hour download, "Never Got That Far" by Gannon (J.) Dick. Next time try a bittorrent! I was promised a 10+ hour download from Canonical's site, but by using torrents I had copies of 32 bit and 64 bit Desktop and 64 bit Server in less than an hour. Downloaded using 3 different computers. This on Release Day! Does this sound greedy? Don't forget that I then had 3 computers uploading to others. Sharing works for everyone; try it.

  279. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Quirkafleeg

    Hi,

    Thanks for the improvement over my fix, I did try building the package directly, but it didn''t seem to have the desired effect upon installation.

    Thinking back I didn't log in/out which was probably why I thought it didn't work and hacked round it by replaced the underlying library, which despite the crudity of the solution works .

    I've stuck a new pastie up here http://pastie.org/690429 with your suggestions.

    Cheers

    Sed

  280. Imagi

    If this is true, why is no one asking for help?

    Well it has been released over a week now. I have installed it on 5 PC's and 2 laptops and am yet to run into any issues. No load noises are coming from the forums about problems, in fact the only place I have heard of any disastrous experiences is this article. Sure there will always be some glitch here or there with an OS upgrade but not the scale that is reported here, Something does not add up.

  281. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    title

    Maybe I'm just lucky, but I upgraded 2 of my computers from the previous version and the whole upgrade process was flawless, download, install, reboot, everything worked from the first try.

    Actually not only it worked, but it fixed many issues for me, for example now I can finally play DVDs / use full screen 3D apps without problems with compiz enabled. Also, my sound works finally, without having to manually upgrade alsa to the SVN version.. and many other smaller issues were fixed.

    So it's not that bad for me. Also let me remind you that this was on both computers an upgrade, so chances that things would go wrong were somewhat higher than a clean install.

  282. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    One Painless Upgrade

    I had a 9.04 worksta, who would boot all the way up to grub then Crash back to Bios / Reboot. One out of Five times I got it to start. Enough time to scp the keepass database off it. Then it crashed. In fact crashing was the problem. You'd be in eBay, bidding on something then boom, your re-booting. Not a damn thing in the logs. (I'll explain later)

    So I though, oh great new ubuntu 9.10 iso... just in time.

    I pop my disk in . boom reboot.

    I disconnect hard drive, and it boots right up.

    Hard drive failed. Completely. lol

    It won't even load windows.

    So I squeaked in with 9.10 on a fresh drive.

    But.... But... where /etc/X11/xorg.conf ! ?

    I was temped to dump a straight debian on it, but she's running fine without the file. And yeah I can rip X out roll it back whatever. But I don't really have time at the moment.

    I give it a thumbs up cause it works. wrksta is back at eBay.

  283. Daemon ZOGG
    Linux

    Ubuntu And "New" Releases of Linux...

    First. I have 10 years of experience in Linux and BSD Unix. I have installed, and configured all of the major Linux distributions for both server and desktop use. Including, but not limited to: RedHat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Slackware, Debian(my favorite), Mandriva, and most associated variants.

    Now that is out of the way. Here is some notable advice from experience.

    1. A new release of ANY software, no matter how many times it was alpha or beta tested before release, will have unexpected bugs. This includes using new kernel releases!

    2. I have always been skeptical of simply "upgrading" a fully configured operating system. The best way is to always back up everything. Don't forget the config files in your "~/home" and "/etc" directories. And then perform a "clean Install". Wipe the drive, and start fresh. This will reeeeally help in reducing the number bugs you may encounter. At least you will know it wasn't a confilct from the previous version. Which can wreak a lot of havoc in some cases.

    3. Early adopters of new OS releases will ALWAYS experience bugs.

    If you are a newbie, go back to your previous version and wait for some of the major bugs to be resolved first.

    If you are technically experienced with Linux(Ubuntu) then stop complaining to the blogs and keep sending Ubuntu those bug reports. It's important so they can be addressed in a timely manner.

    Early adopting a new release is NOT for newbies or the faint-of-heart.

    Eventually the bugs in "Karmic Koala" will be worked out. Be patient.

    And before anyone is "quick to judge" a Linux distribution.. M$ has its own buggy history: Win3.0, Win95a, WinME, Vista. Win7 will and already has coughed up a few of its own major bugs.

    Regular users of Ubuntu, be patient.

    Experienced, technical Ubuntu users, Send Ubuntu Those Bug Reports.

    ;)

  284. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    games

    ubuntu has lots of nice games.

    which is good because it lacks drivers.....................

  285. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You could use this same story for every Ubuntu release

    EVERY Ubuntu release has major problems like this.

    It will fix half the bugs that were introduced in the last release, but introduce just as many of its own. It's really tiring to have to deal with this every six months.

    "Should I upgrade to fix this annoying problem I've been dealing with? Will the new problems be better or worse?"

    Google Trends shows interest in Ubuntu has reached a plateau. Users are sick and tired of this garbage.

    At this rate, the only hope I see of a Linux desktop ever being relevant to normal users is if Google produces it.

  286. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @AC 10th Nov 21:43

    "which is good because it lacks drivers....................."

    Huh? First of all, I'm not at all a fan of those Ubuntu-like-clicky distros (I have ArchLinux on most of my machines), but even I accept that Ubuntu had and has WAY better hardware support than other linux distributions (I'm talking about out-of-the-box support).

    Of course, it's still not as good as Windows, but well, you can work out why if you know something about the industry.

    Could you specify in which ways drivers lack so badly in it? (Except if you were comparing with Windows...)

  287. NigelH
    Thumb Up

    I always do a fresh install

    no problems here, having a separate Home partition always helps, left that on ext3 but I also always recreate my profile by renaming it beforehand then moving the data into the newly created profile. Another bonus is that on my laptop the locking up problem seems to have been fixed, I never found out what it was on 9.04 but I suspected the ATI graphics support.

    Now I'm waiting to see what Mint has in store for us.

  288. Leo Maxwell
    Linux

    still no issues!

    Installed it on several systems now, 32 bit, 64 bit, Acer aspire one SSD (UNR).

    No problems at all!

    In fact on the work system , it scanned the network and offered up a list of all network attached printers for install.

    What driver problems?

    Apart from a lot of cheap and nasty stuff, and just released hardware, most things work OOTB.

    Most major Manufacturers are now offering Linux support ( HP, Ricoh, Samsung, Sharp, KonicaMinolta,Toshiba, etc,etc.)

    In fact a lot of stuff that is no longer supported b y windows still works with Linux!

  289. SilverWave
    Linux

    Mark Shuttleworth said...

    Mark Shuttleworth said he had seen no sign that there were any major issues with hard drives, defaulting to older kernels or encryption. "I've no doubt there are regressions but none that have yet crossed the threshold to 'widespread consequence'," he added.

    The blank and flickering screens on boot have been identified as being caused by a missing kernel module and this was experienced by users who had computers with video cards that use nvidia chips.

    http://www.itwire.com/content/view/29266/1090/

  290. SilverWave
    Linux

    Missing kernel module on boot causes rapidly flashing black screen during boot

    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Nvidia

    Quote:

    By and large it sounds like the vast majority of users had smooth upgrade experiences. However, it came to our attention that some nvidia users experienced a problem during upgrades to Karmic where X fails to load and instead flashes a black screen continuously rather than going into the low graphics failsafe mode; this problem is now solved. Further investigation as to why it was going into failsafe mode to begin with, showed that the problem was that the nvidia.ko kernel module was missing during boot; these are due to a variety of unusual situations, and are described in more detail below.

  291. The BigYin
    FAIL

    No major issues?

    That's a larf. Had to drop the ATI drivers down to the previous version and there are still major problems.

    If Ubuntu has proved one thing, it's that Linux is not now (and willnot be for the next 5 years or so) ready for prime-time.

  292. The BigYin
    Linux

    @pengwyn

    xorg.conf is deprecated - the file is no no longer needed nor used. X will try an respected it if it finds it...but you shouldn't really use it any more.

    That is my understanding anyway...how the hell you're meant to configure things that don't work OOTB is a good question!

  293. bdoe
    Megaphone

    Upgrade Experience not Stellar...

    but it wasn't fraught with failure as this article might suggest. My graphics worked just fine, my hard drives worked just fine, and the installed kernel is one of the newer ones, at 2.6.31-14. I suppose it goes without saying that I did a clean install.

    This is not to say that I didn't have problems. Pulseaudio is a mess and Network-Manager, which worked flawlessly (for the very first time) in Jaunty, is again broken in Karmic. Oh, and installing the proprietary driver for my soft-modem made my sound card "magically" disappear. But none of my issues have been severe enough to make me consider rolling back, though that is always an option I have.

    For those of you complaining about having to go through this sort of pain every six months, I have but one question for you: Why? Why put yourself through all of that every six months? Ubuntu has a LTS system for a reason. The non-LTS releases should be viewed as the bleeding-edge, unstable, "early-adopter" versions, while the LTS releases are made specifically for those of you who "just need a computer to work" without all the futzing around. If you don't want to get your hands dirty over a weekend every six months, then don't. But if you DO choose to upgrade every six months rather than every two years, then be prepared to make Launchpad your best friend.

  294. Christopher Martin

    Nothing new

    I started using ubuntu with Gutsy, and have tried a couple upgrades over the last 2 years. Never again. I have three machines running three different ubuntu versions, but I won't consider trying to upgrade any of them. When I need a newer version, I'll reinstall rather than go through that hell.

    I don't blame them for not having a good upgrade procedure... it's probably a really hard problem. I just wish they would be honest and advertise it as something that probably won't work well.

  295. Al Taylor
    Thumb Up

    Dell Mini 10

    upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on a Dell Mini 10 on the day of release and everything worked flawlessly.

  296. Andrew Herron
    Thumb Up

    Well it worked fine for me...

    I've upgraded a number of machines now from 9.04 to 9.10 with very different hardware specs...and they have all gone completely smoothly.

    Hmmm...but hang on...that does not make a vey good 'news' story does it ;-)

  297. Smac
    Alert

    This should be expected behaviour

    Ubuntu has always been: Debian + cutting edge software + tweaked UI. "Everyone Knows" that Ubuntu is not where you go for for a stable, problem-free OS.

    I've been upgrading Ubuntu on one of my pc's faithfully since 4.10 and with each release there seems to be more problems. This release has been the worst for me. After upgrading, if I didn't know my way around the boot process, xorg.conf, initramfs or whatever it's called, etc. this computer would have needed a complete OS overhaul. This nasty little bug included just for kicks, too, which brought my system to a grinding halt.

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/rsyslog/+bug/453444

    Yeah, so maybe it'd be nice if Ubuntu had good, well-tested polished releases, but maybe people should just use other distros if they don't want problems.

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