back to article Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC

Canonical says it is working to fix a problem that's crippling some Ubuntu PCs after they've been upgraded to the latest version of the Linux distro. A spokesperson for the company told The Reg it is aware of a "small number" of "power users" are seeing their PCs crash following the move to 14.04. Until there's a fix, the …

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  1. dogged

    Upgrading anything may knacker anything but don't worry your pretty little head, Gavin - we don't expect you to know that. You're the software correspondent.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Presumably the Reg has a stylebook, outlining the meanings of knacker, brick, bugger up and fry,

      1. Message From A Self-Destructing Turnip
        Headmaster

        borked

        I believe the correct terminology in this case is "borked". Knackered would imply damage or wear through over use, which is not the case here.

    2. Jim 59

      Dogged very rude but right. This kind of grub breakage is almost an everyday occurance for dual-booting users, as is the well known fix. And muffing grub is hardly knackering your PC. Guess it is still a bug though.

      1. Werner McGoole

        Grub's a really touchy beast these days

        Especially if you've more than one OS installed. Breaks as soon as you look at it. Fortunately fixing it is usually pretty simple. Overall, not necessarily a good situation, though.

        I guess it's just become over-bloated as these things always seem to do.

    3. asdf

      my 2 cents

      Want to never deal with crossed finger upgrades again check out Linux Mint Debian Edition. I actually follow Debian Testing (with latest Cinnamon DE) myself where there are breakages but I like mucking about with my system.

      1. DropBear
        Unhappy

        Re: my 2 cents

        Want to never deal with crossed finger upgrades again check out Linux Mint Debian Edition

        Is that because under Mint you're never actually supposed to upgrade anything at all but nuke from orbit and reinstall fresh every time...?

        1. johnnytruant

          Re: my 2 cents

          Not on Debian Edition. It is, as the name suggests, tracking Debian, so it's rolling releases.

          1. asdf

            Re: my 2 cents

            Its actually semi rolling as it basically releases update pack snapshots periodically (though somewhat erratically lately). The only real knock I have on LMDE and why I went with Debian Testing is LMDE is too slim on security updates IMHO.

        2. Barry Rueger

          Re: my 2 cents

          FWIW I did clean Mint install last month - new hard drive - and it was ridiculously painless.

          It took all of fifteen minutes, including remembering how to disable Caps Lock, plus fifteen more to install the two or three non-default apps that I use.

          I shudder to think about how much I used to dread the regular Windows re-installs back in the day.

    4. Tony Green

      Yes, but...

      Most things are easy to fix from backups. Bugger up the bootloader and it gets nasty.

    5. MadMike

      Upgrade safely

      "...Upgrading anything may knacker anything but don't worry your pretty little head, Gavin - we don't expect you to know that..."

      With ZFS and Solaris you are immune to this problem. You just take a snapshot of the filesystem before upgrading, and if the system is unstable you just reboot again, into the earlier state and delete the last unstable snapshot. It is a killer feature, as you can take a snapshot on a live system, and upgrade it and test it. And then you just reboot and in GRUB choose which snapshot you want to boot into.

  2. James 51

    This happened to me but I had everything backed up so the quickest thing was to create a bootable usb with 14.04 on it and reinstall wiping the previous install out.

    1. XenonXZ

      Un... why didnt you just reinstall the bootloader..?

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Windows

        "Un... why didnt you just reinstall the bootloader..?"

        Just in case; google "Ubuntu reinstall bootloader using a live CD"

        Takes minutes rather than an hour or so for re-install and restore backups. Another trick is the separate /home and / partitions so just the OS can be re-installed using the 'custom partitioning' without copying back hundreds of Gb of 'stuff'.

    2. MadMike

      Primitive!

      Do you really reinstall everything when you bork your Linux system with an upgrade? That is really primitive! Why dont you use ZFS-On-Linux instead? At least on Solaris you can snapshot a live system before an upgrade, and if the upgrade fails you just reboot into the earlier state, and delete the snapshot. You choose which snapshot you want to boot into via GRUB. Really neat. Has saved me many hours of work several times, when I have done something stupid in Solaris. I just take a snapshot (takes a second) and then I am free to do anything such as deleting the kernel, etc.

  3. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Surely you'd use a Windows 7 boot CD to re-install the OS if you're a power user? No?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Surely you'd use a Windows 7 boot CD to re-install the OS if you're a power user? No?"

      No...

      A real power user would take a screwdriver and open up his harddrive and then

      use a frigging magnet to re-align the bits in the bootsector himself...

      1. Steven Raith

        Re: "Surely you'd use a Windows 7 boot CD to re-install the OS if you're a power user? No?"

        A magnet? Pussy. I just shout at the computer till it starts working, that's how the real IT Professionals roll!

        ;-)

        1. william 10

          Re: "Surely you'd use a Windows 7 boot CD to re-install the OS if you're a power user? No?"

          Na! you need a hammer & a nail and lots arm muscle

      2. Allonymous Coward
        Joke

        Using a frigging magnet to re-align the bits in the bootsector

        Obligatory XKCD reference:

        http://xkcd.com/378/

    2. yossarianuk

      No they run KDE generally

      I have never met a 'power' user that runs Windows.

      IF you want a desktop you can can really get to the 'guts' of then KDE/Linux is a good combo.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Windows

        Re: No they run KDE generally

        Hi there, pleased to meet you....

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: No they run KDE generally

        "I have never met a 'power' user that runs Windows."

        They mostly do in the enterprise. All the traders here with 6-8 HD screens each on a single PC and each running dozens of trading applications, market data feeds, broker screens and Excel sheets, etc. etc. all run Windows 7. We do get the odd few that want a UNIX shell or to compile stuff so we just install Services for UNIX - which lets them run and compile what they like and offers a choice of shells - but without all the security and management issues of a native Linux OS...

        1. keithpeter Silver badge
          Windows

          Re: No they run KDE generally

          "All the traders here with 6-8 HD screens each on a single PC and each running dozens of trading applications, market data feeds, broker screens and Excel sheets, etc. etc. all run Windows 7. We do get the odd few that want a UNIX shell or to compile stuff so we just install Services for UNIX - which lets them run and compile what they like and offers a choice of shells - but without all the security and management issues of a native Linux OS..."

          And what runs the servers that the clients connect to?

          I'm genuinely interested, not trolling...

          1. h4rm0ny

            Re: No they run KDE generally

            "And what runs the servers that the clients connect to? I'm genuinely interested, not trolling..."

            Can't say exactly without knowing what the person was doing / who they were working for. A lot of these systems are running on Windows Server, but the London Stock Exchange itself has moved from that to Novell Linux following a nasty crash that happened back in (I think 2008).

            That's a software crash, btw. Not the usual wipe-out-your-pensions-give-money-to-the-banks-quick financial crash that happens every few years.

      3. NogginTheNog
        Devil

        Re: No they run KDE generally

        Where I come from "power users" are the BANE of real IT professionals.

    3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Coat

      Nah,

      the real power user would install SCO Linux and ...

      1. Stoneshop
        Pint

        Re: Nah,

        There are at least 4 commentards here that don't understand sarcasm. Here, have an upvote (and a cool one)

    4. h4rm0ny

      >>"Surely you'd use a Windows 7 boot CD to re-install the OS if you're a power user? No?"

      Or better, just run it in a VM. Either GNU/Linux on Windows (7+ obviously) or Windows on GNU/Linux. Either way, dual-booting is so 2007. ;)

      Plus if you have two monitors like me, you have the best of both worlds at the same time!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hold on... power users... Ubuntu... Must be a mix up there. No power users would use Ubuntu :P

    1. vagabondo

      Re: No power users would use Ubuntu

      But "power users" are newbie incompetents, who only think that they know stuff. The shiny, shiny new kids' distro-for-dummies was made especially to appeal to the ex-softie "power users".

  5. Stevie
    Trollface

    Bah!

    So ... not so "trusty" after all. What do you expect if you name your OS after livestock?

    Shoulda gone with "Turbothrust Annihilator" like I said before.

  6. Connor

    No problem for me.

    I upgraded, which is always a tense and nerve racking experience anyway as you never know what is going to go wrong. Thank god I didn't hear about this first. I didn't have this problem, indeed quite unusually I have had no problems at all, yet. It even left Windows alone.

    1. localgeek

      Re: No problem for me.

      No major problems with the upgrade here to Xubuntu 14.04. The only glitch I ran into was a problem where Xfce didn't want to let me change my wallpaper. I'm not sure exactly what I did to fix it, but I think I mostly just logged off and back on the session and it magically went back to normal.

    2. Michael Thibault

      Re: No problem for me.

      >...as you never know what is going to go wrong.

      Of course, you don't, foolish human; it never goes wrong the same way twice. That's what makes it 'interesting'.

    3. keithpeter Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: No problem for me.

      "I upgraded, which is always a tense and nerve racking experience anyway as you never know what is going to go wrong."

      @Connor

      Life is too short for being tense and nerve-wracked by a computer!

      I use recycled laptops, one for serious work and one for playing around with. No guarantees so I practice 'defensive backup' as follows...

      1) Do the full jwz backup thing (google 'jwz backup'). Find out about rsync and the command line options you need to use for NTFS external hard drives. Test out the various rsync command line options.

      2) Once a full backup of all your files has completed, test the readability of both backup drives on another computer before proceeding. Save the command lines you used in a text file for future use. Google 'bash history' and the bash 'Ctrl-r' command search functions.

      3) Download Clonezilla and make a bootable USB stick and have another external HD dedicated to clones of your hard drive. Just use the simple settings and image whole drive of the computer you want to upgrade. There are guides available by Googling

      4) Nuke target computer hard drive. Restore the clonezilla image as a test. If all works well...

      Then, either

      5a) Do the upgrade with the warm feeling inside that you can go back to the known working Clonezilla image

      OR

      5b) Nuke again and clean install new system with same user name and password. Then restore home drives, perhaps having renamed the dot files depending on changes in the UI. (I have a separate backup of just the dotfiles).

      dotfiles: watch out for email programs that store email in .mail or something. If using Firefox, export bookmarks as html file now and again. If using Evolution, export an archive now and again. Watch out for version changes with Evolution!

  7. Richard Lloyd

    Use the VM, Luke

    The best thing to do with any new Linux release is to run it in a VM first (e.g. VirtualBox) and have a good play with it to make sure it behaves itself. Then you should wait a month or so for updates to fix the initial release problems (because the wider audience will discover stuff not found in testing) and if you're still worried, set up a dual boot between the old and new Linux versions so you have an easy way to go back if something insurmountable still crops up.

    Sadly, I'm finding neither Fedora nor Ubuntu particularly attractive at the moment, so I have now-unused VMs with them in and stick with my trusty CentOS 6.5 as the bare metal OS (along with a dual boot to Windows for games of course).

    1. the spectacularly refined chap

      Re: Use the VM, Luke

      The best thing to do with any new Linux release is to run it in a VM first (e.g. VirtualBox) and have a good play with it to make sure it behaves itself.

      Except that it probably wouldn't have helped here. If userland components work in a VM that's a pretty good confidence test but for anything dealing with the hardware - the kernel, drivers and indeed boot loader - it's pretty much a stab in the dark. Differences between emulated and physical hardware are always potential issues. It sounds like something like that is happening here since it's only affecting a subset of users and not everyone, suggesting it is some hardware quirk at issue.

      A similar thing happened to me a couple of months ago upgrading a server from NetBSD 6.0 to 6.1. Fire up a VM - yes, the bare OS works. Rebuild the applications and test those.. check. Apply current production configuration to the VM and make sure nothing breaks... check. Install on the physical hardware and make sure it boots - no problem. Re-install applications and user data - again no problems. Load on some archived data from DVD+R - fine. Drop in a DVD-RAM... oops.

      VMs just don't show problems like that.

    2. vincent himpe

      Re: Use the VM, Luke

      Sure, why don't we all wait until 'the others' try it and fix the bugs... kinda like what happened with OpenSSL.. heartbleed ring a bell ? Must have been the same 'others' that were supposedly looking at that code since they had the source to it.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Use the VM, Luke

      "stick with my trusty CentOS 6.5 as the bare metal OS"

      Just install Hyper-V Server - It's a free download and you can run both Windows and Linux under it. It's faster and more efficient than any production Linux hypervisor at the moment.

  8. Steve T

    It happened to me, but a boot repair via a system loaded from DVD only took an hour or so, so I didn't bother reporting it.

    Not the first time an Ubuntu upgrade has trashed grub, so I kind of expected it.

    1. Chris Redpath

      same here too

      Me too, grub complained about fonts and dropped me into a nonfunctional recovery prompt.

      I happen to have a boot repair disk from

      https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

      around, it was able to repair grub automatically so I didn't have to do anything except click apply and reboot.

      Its very handy.

  9. Anonymous Cowardess
    Meh

    I've been having this problem for years

    It's been a few years since I made a clean install and every time I made an upgrade I had to reinstall the bootloader. Can't remember when it started. Never found anything on the forums. But I'm getting a new hard disk, and with news of this bug, a clean install of 14.04 is looking more and more attractive.

  10. Fibbles

    I read through the launchpad comments to get more details since they're scant in the article. Either Phillip Susi is a master troll or a mindless jerk who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes... or both.

  11. Steven Raith

    Just a note that might be useful

    I always have an Ubuntu bootable USB pen with Grub-rescue installed on it. I have a proper weirdy bootloader with about seven OSs on it, and it often gets eaten when I start playing with EFI shizzle - so it's a handy thing to have in a drawer somewhere.

    Detects your filesystems, rewrites GRUB, Bobs your uncle, Fanny's your aunt, and gertrude is your second cousin twice removed that you need to be careful about getting drunk around because that sort of thing isn't really approved of these days.

    Steven R

  12. XenonXZ

    Not such a big deal... just reinstall the bootloader from a livecd...

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Grub problems.

    Never ending. Every version of any flavor of Linux screws itself up when trying to fiddle with Grub entries.

    Ubuntu is by far the worst, leaving all sorts of crud around after updates, 17 kernels spewed on my hard disk, and of course safe modes for each of them. You can bet it break any Windows boot loader entries too, just to be safe. And you can also bet that the mess that FakeRAID is will confuse the hell out if it.

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge

      Re: Grub problems.

      Really?

      I didn't have any problem upgrading a machine from debian wheezy to the current testing a couple of weeks ago.

      It just worked (tm)

      1. DropBear
        FAIL

        Re: Grub problems.

        It just worked (tm)

        Count your blessings, then. Upgrading the 8.04 LTS Mythbuntu to the 10.04 LTS resulted in failure to boot - the grub boot list somehow got "updated" disk IDs that obviously found no disk to boot. Then the upgrade from that to the 12.04 LTS... you guessed it - failed to boot, because apparently something "suddenly" didn't have the right permissions anymore.

        Ultimately I fix this sort of thing (with the appropriate amount of disgust, to be sure) but I sure do wonder how the heck the Average Joe - towards who Ubuntu is marketed - is supposed to deal with failure to boot after an upgrade. I mean I'm sure it's no big deal at Boeing either if one leaves a screwdriver in a jet engine or something...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Grub problems.

      Mine doesn't leave old kernels behind - sometimes I've had to do an auto remove to get rid of them but..

      Done several upgrades on this laptop with a EUFI configuration (dual boot into Windows 7) and its never glitched at all.

      1. Tommy Pock

        Re: Grub problems.

        I thought that, until I checked. sudo autoremove doesn't get rid of old kernels - only you're trusted to do that.

        When I did check one day, I had a couple of gigabytes of the buggers lying about.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Grub problems

      "You can bet it break any Windows boot loader entries too"

      Install Grub to the root partition. In Windows, install EaseUS Partition Master Free and set Linux active; reboot, use Grub, keep a working Windows boot loader. Almost everyone is happy.

  14. Pen-y-gors

    'Twas ever thus

    Was happily using Ubuntu 11.04. Decided to upgrade to 11.10 which promptly went berserk as it couldn't handle the integrated graphics on my old Shuttle box. Major hassle getting it back to 11.04. When I can afford a new box then I may have another go with a serious Linux distro.

    1. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

      Re: 'Twas ever thus

      "Was happily using Ubuntu 11.04. Decided to upgrade to 11.10 which promptly went berserk as it couldn't handle the integrated graphics on my old Shuttle box."

      Actually, a lot of video drivers were completely wrecked in 11.10 that worked in 11.04; in 12.04 most of these worked again.

      I used to run every new Ubuntu version, starting with 8.04 or so. But, 10.10 just broke stuff compared to 10.04; 11.04 came together pretty well; 11.10 was quite broken again, and the real "fix" for it was to upgrade to 12.04. Given this, with 12.10, and 13.xx, I tested them strictly in VMs. I'll go right from 12.04 to 14.04 on my real hardware (which apparently does avoid the specific grub problem here, since it's manifested on 13.10->14.04 upgrades.)

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Now I'm glad...

    ...my "wait two week" upgrade protocol.

    1. Salts

      Re: Now I'm glad...

      Yep, only way to fly, unlike my, wife especially when it comes to iOS upgrades, she is front and centre for upgrades, when hers starts working properly I upgrade mine, I never seem to have a problem :-)

      Not sure how many power users run out to upgrade immediately on their production box either and that's any OS or distro not just Ubuntu, simple rules

      1 upgrade for Linux Kernel, wait one week

      2. upgrade for Linux Distro any flavour wait 2-4 weeks

      3. upgrade for OSX wait 2-4 weeks

      4. upgrade for windows available depending on version number wait 2-3 months or 2 - 3 years :-)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Now I'm glad...

      I don't use anything other than LTS releases, and my policy is to always wait 6-months to a year for all the major bugs to be found/fixed.

      Installed new server on Saturday, 12.04.4 LTS all the way!

  16. Tsu Dho Nimh
    FAIL

    " the upgrade breaks the GRUB bootloader, rendering the machine unbootable."

    I had that problem multiple times with Ubuntu, maybe even with the last install ... instead of reading my GRUB and keeping the information it writes a default GRUB file. And, because my disk drive assignments aren't bog standard, It can't find the boot information.

    I reported it several times and got zero response from them.

    1. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Tempest in a teacup

      It's usually that other OS that trashes your boot loader. This is so common and has gone on for so long that no one should be the least bit shocked or bothered by this kind of situation. The only real difference here is the identity of the culprit.

      1. sabroni Silver badge

        Yeah fucking Microsoft! Bunch of twats.

        Sorry, what was the article about again?

      2. h4rm0ny
        Facepalm

        Re: Tempest in a teacup

        So just to get this straight - a problem is with Ubuntu is a reason for you to attack Microsoft. Makes me wonder what wouldn't be, to you. Seriously - why do you always want to make everything a flamefest about One True OS? They're both good and neither perfect.

  17. Truth4u

    top tip: ubuntu is full of crap

    What a clever idea to unify the search so you have one box to find files and applications, because once you're using it, they have you by the balls to insert any kind of junk advertising they want into the results. And that's exactly what they've done.

    Used to be an ubuntu fan but there's nothing cool about an OS that shows adverts.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: top tip: ubuntu is full of crap

      I wouldn't use Ubuntu precisely because of that but I thought you could just turn that "feature" off after the shit-storm it caused?

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: top tip: ubuntu is full of crap

        Yes you can turn it off and it will be off-by-default in the next 14.10 release.

        But this is an LTS release aimed at corporates, sp especially annoying to have it turned on

    2. simon_brooke

      Re: top tip: ubuntu is full of crap

      Top tips:

      (a) use the configuration, Luke

      (b) use of Unity is in any case optional.

      1. Truth4u

        Re: top tip: ubuntu is full of crap

        Since adverts are on by default and you need to use the menu to change the settings, looking at at least one advert will always be mandatory in Ubuntu. Ok you probably know some super keyboard shortcut to change the settings, but I would rather memorize more important things than that so there.

  18. Greg J Preece

    Worked OK here upgrading Kubuntu on my desktop. Given that the laptop is a tri-boot hybrid-partition bootloader mess (thanks, Apple!) I might hold off on doing that one for now...

  19. Johnny Canuck

    Boot a live cd, chroot into your installation, update-grub.

    1. DropBear
      Devil

      "Just drop out the tranny, lift the engine, resurface the block, throw it back together - easy. What the heck are you lot whining about...?" Right? Right...

  20. ecofeco Silver badge

    News a day late and a dollar short for me

    The only thing really stopping Ubuntu from taking over has been very poor QC of the last 3 versions and a joke of an installer and updater.

    Fix that and make it dirt simple for non-techies to install, and world domination will happen.

    Oh, and as for the recommended fixes? NONE of them worked. The final fix was to boot to a Win DVD, get a command prompt and run bootrec/fixmbr.

    Took me 3 hours to find the fix and 10 minutes to actually fix it.

    1. keithpeter Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: News a day late and a dollar short for me

      "The only thing really stopping Ubuntu from taking over has been very poor QC of the last 3 versions and a joke of an installer and updater."

      And providing as wide a testing coverage on real hardware as possible, is what The Community should really be doing. Without that QC teams have fewer issues to work with. I recollect various pleas for more ISO testing, and specifically upgrade testing on various Ubuntu outlets a few years ago when 12.04 was coming in. I did do some ISO tests on 12.04 with shonky Intel integrated graphics on an old AMD box I had.

      Could we perhaps be seeing here the effect of a shift of the hobbyists and tinkerers to other Linux distributions? The kind of people who will spend a Sunday morning tracking down an obscure issue on a particular combination of hardware with a specific distribution rather than just tossing it and installing another?

      Debian Stable and the Enterprise Linuxen (RHEL, CentOS, Springdale Linux and Oracle Linux) are generally regarded as more stable and better tested than Ubuntu, but that may simply be a reflection of the much longer testing periods. Packages tend to be older on Debian Stable and the ELs. Swings, roundabouts.

  21. Tony Green

    Grub is a problem

    Most things breaking are (relatively) trivial to fix. If Grub goes tits-up, it's a serious problem.

    Funnily enough, Grub updates are the reason I gave up Ubuntu and moved to Debian. Four or five routine Grub updates threw up messages that they'd failed and my computer may be un-bootable.

    I can restore my system from backups easily for almost any problem, but if the Grub bootloader's bust, I'm in the shit!

  22. damian fell

    Hmm - I actually found this the first upgrade for Ubuntu that worked without breakign anything, so it's obviously not a universal fault.

  23. RAMChYLD

    Ah, inability to boot

    I just filed a bug report for it this weekend. Seems pretty silly that they forgot to include the dm-raid modules in the initrd and thus renders the rebuild of my media center unbootable since I decided out of the blue to convert the box to RAID5 (and convert it to Linux from Win7, but that's because of my lately-increased hatred for M$). It's a pretty silly mistake since the modules are needed for the machine to boot. I did manage to fix it tho.

    Bugreport: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1313169

    Ironically, I have two other RAIDed Ubuntu boxes and they upgraded and boot fine, albeit they're fitted with RAID0 instead, since they're built primarily for my gaming needs.

    I also have a problem with the NetworkManager applet not showing on all three boxes- may file a bug report later, once I figure out how to fix that- the internet searches seems to suggest that there's an error in the dbus config somewhere.

  24. Stoneshop
    FAIL

    Power users

    However, our reader remarked the only reason more people haven't reported this bug is that most have been locked out their systems all week.

    These are not the power users you are looking for.

  25. simon_brooke

    Crisis? What crisis?

    Yeah, yeah, this happened to mine. It's a bore, but it takes five minutes to fix, and if you're a 'power user' you'll know precisely how to do it.

    Boot from a USB stick, mount your hard drive, symlink your (real) boot directory to /boot, dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc

    Done.

  26. Brian Souder 1

    Dell Studio 1535 Laptop

    My Dell Studio 1535 seems to have problems waking up from sleep on 14.04. The screen stays blanked and I would assume it is off in la la land if it were not that the lighting in the keyboard comes on for a few moments. And they still did not fix the reversed power save mode when you go on and off battery power. Everything is fine while you are on battery - then you plug-in and it dims the screen like you went on battery. You can at least use the brightness keys to bring it back up. Reported that one last year.

  27. MadMike

    Linux has no design

    Linus Torvalds has said that Linux does not have a design, and will never have. Instead, big parts are rewritten all the time, so we iterate to a better version. Just like nature evolved humans from apes. This "rewrite and throw everything all the time" is superior to a stable design - according to Linus.

    This leads to big parts of the code being in beta stage all the time. The code never has time to mature, so it is unstable all the time. Just read all the threads here on problems when upgrading. Linux is very fragile, upgrade it and chances are big it won't work. But hey, people said that Windows is the best system for years. So there will be people saying that Linux is the best system.

    Linux is the new Windows, fragile and sloppy code. Another big problem is that the internal Linux ABIs are frequently changed so you need to modify your device drivers, and recompile them. New kernel releases might trigger recompilations and modifications. Depending on which kernel you use, you need to use the corresponding device version. That is one of the reason this article was written. Big OEM vendors have large problems updating all device drivers every time the Linux ABIs are changed. They need to employ developers doing this. Say HP has 1.000 drivers, and they have 10 developers doing nothing but this. Then they have to fix 1000 drivers each. How long will it take to modify and recompile 1000 drivers for a single programmer? Say he does 10 drivers a day, it will take 100 days. But before that, Linus Torvalds has chagned the ABIs again.

    No other OS has this broken device driver model as Linux has. Within a windows version, your drivers will work. Within XP, your driver will work no matter you run XP SP1, SP2 or SP3. With Win8, your drivers will work no matter you run 8.1 or 8 SP1 or SP2, etc. Only Linux has this broken model. And that is the reason you get problems when you upgrade Linux. And this article could be written.

  28. henrydddd

    Fresh install

    I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 on the day after it was released. So far I have had no problems and 14.04 is both faster and less buggy that 12.04. I have had many problems in the past with Ubuntu messing up using the upgrade option, so I jiust nuke the hard drive and do a fresh install and I have had fewer problems. I have been using Ubuntu since it was in the 5's

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    grub?

    I can't remember an upgrade of this box ever preventing in from booting. Of course I am using Lilo without an initrd. Saves a boatload of hassle

  30. ShrekD'Ogre
    Meh

    Whew! Lucky Me

    I just updated my nine year old's Ultra book to 14.04 from 13.10. Went off without a hitch.

  31. This post has been deleted by its author

  32. J 3
    Linux

    Yup, happened to one of my computers. But 5 minutes later it was fixed -- well, because I had the live USB right there, I'm familiar with Grub2, Linux boot, blah blah. If I wasn't, then things would have been definitely more scary.

  33. johnwerneken

    what a nuisance

    I suppose I shall burn an Alternate DVD and restore grub on the Linux partition, redo the multiboot stuff after if needed.

    Snazzy mass market distro should not do such things. With dual boot in mbr and not with grup but with windows, none of the easier ways of addressing this type of thing apply. Takes too much fussing rebooting each time to verify which of Linux, grub, windows mbr bootloader, or that bootloader's multi-boot bcd entries or the config snippet from the Linux partition is a fault; to fix the offending component; and to verify everything works, not just the same or a different selection of some things.

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