Upgrade to 8.10?

Hello everyone,

After using FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux happily for several years, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop computer this summer, and I was pleasantly surprised. Repeatedly.
Stuff that I had expected to put some work into just worked.

I also ran my small home server on Ubuntu for some time, upgrading from 6.06 to 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10 before switching to Debian (for reasons not having to do with Ubuntu itself nor Debian, actually), and I the upgrade worked very smoothly every single time.

Now that Ubuntu 8.10 has been released, I wonder if I should upgrade my desktop. Since 8.04 is an LTS release, I am not exactly in a hurry, but I still wonder.

So if anyone of you has upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10, I would like to hear about your experiences with regards to what has changed and how that has affected you.
I am mostly very pleased with the way my system works now, but Amarok is being a little bitchy, occasionally it will play a track for a few seconds, then skip it, as if I had pressed "Next Track", thus ruining the score of some of my favorite tracks. As much as I love Amarok otherwise, this little annoyance really tends to get me upset.
Otherwise, I am pretty happy with how my system works right now.

Oh, if that matters, my system is an AMD Athlon64X2 3800+ (I run the 32-bit version, though) with 2GB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce ... something (on Gentoo, I could play Quake and Postal2, although performance was suboptimal). Ubuntu 8.04 did a good job of recognizing my hardware, so I am not worried in this regard.


I expect the upgrade won't break my system or anything, just wondering if I could expect any benefits.

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences, and offering
Thanks in advance,
Benjamin

Hi there, well my specs are similar to yours except I'm running kubuntu 64 bit. I used adept to upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 and I have not had any major problems or found anything that requires a tremendous amount of brain power to fix.
I run apache2 and mysql on my machine and once I changed the docroot for apache2 it all worked fine. I have attempted to run an encrypted dvd to no avail, it's something I still need to look into, libdvdcss doesn't seem to be working. Virtualbox needed new config files for exsisting vdi images to boot. QT4 certainly is very nice to look at, fonts are much sharper, windows are much cleaner but the kmenu I'm still getting used to. Networking
Overall I'm satisfied and like it very much.


Benjamin Walkenhorst wrote:
[color=blue]
> Hello everyone,
>
> After using FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux happily for several years, I
> installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop computer this summer, and I was
> pleasantly surprised. Repeatedly. Stuff that I had expected to put some
> work into just worked.
>
> I also ran my small home server on Ubuntu for some time, upgrading from
> 6.06 to 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10 before switching to Debian (for reasons not
> having to do with Ubuntu itself nor Debian, actually), and I the upgrade
> worked very smoothly every single time.
>
> Now that Ubuntu 8.10 has been released, I wonder if I should upgrade my
> desktop. Since 8.04 is an LTS release, I am not exactly in a hurry, but I
> still wonder.
>
> So if anyone of you has upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10, I would like to hear
> about your experiences with regards to what has changed and how that has
> affected you. I am mostly very pleased with the way my system works now,
> but Amarok is being a little bitchy, occasionally it will play a track for
> a few seconds, then skip it, as if I had pressed "Next Track", thus
> ruining the score of some of my favorite tracks. As much as I love Amarok
> otherwise, this little annoyance really tends to get me upset. Otherwise,
> I am pretty happy with how my system works right now.
>
> Oh, if that matters, my system is an AMD Athlon64X2 3800+ (I run the
> 32-bit version, though) with 2GB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce ...
> something (on Gentoo, I could play Quake and Postal2, although performance
> was suboptimal). Ubuntu 8.04 did a good job of recognizing my hardware, so
> I am not worried in this regard.
>
>
> I expect the upgrade won't break my system or anything, just wondering if
> I could expect any benefits.
>
> Looking forward to hearing about your experiences, and offering
> Thanks in advance,
> Benjamin[/color]

--
If at first you don't succeed try, try again.

On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:14:21 +0100, Benjamin Walkenhorst scrievit this wi
a finger in the stour:
[color=blue]
> Hello everyone,
>
> After using FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux happily for several years, I
> installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop computer this summer, and I was
> pleasantly surprised. Repeatedly. Stuff that I had expected to put some
> work into just worked.
>
> I also ran my small home server on Ubuntu for some time, upgrading from
> 6.06 to 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10 before switching to Debian (for reasons not
> having to do with Ubuntu itself nor Debian, actually), and I the upgrade
> worked very smoothly every single time.
>
> Now that Ubuntu 8.10 has been released, I wonder if I should upgrade my
> desktop. Since 8.04 is an LTS release, I am not exactly in a hurry, but
> I still wonder.
>
> So if anyone of you has upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10, I would like to hear
> about your experiences with regards to what has changed and how that has
> affected you. I am mostly very pleased with the way my system works now,
> but Amarok is being a little bitchy, occasionally it will play a track
> for a few seconds, then skip it, as if I had pressed "Next Track", thus
> ruining the score of some of my favorite tracks. As much as I love
> Amarok otherwise, this little annoyance really tends to get me upset.
> Otherwise, I am pretty happy with how my system works right now.
>
> Oh, if that matters, my system is an AMD Athlon64X2 3800+ (I run the
> 32-bit version, though) with 2GB of RAM and an nVidia GeForce ...
> something (on Gentoo, I could play Quake and Postal2, although
> performance was suboptimal). Ubuntu 8.04 did a good job of recognizing
> my hardware, so I am not worried in this regard.
>
>
> I expect the upgrade won't break my system or anything, just wondering
> if I could expect any benefits.
>
> Looking forward to hearing about your experiences, and offering Thanks
> in advance,
> Benjamin[/color]

I tried a fresh install of 8.10 on my old (4+ years) Sony Vaio laptop. It
broke. Apparently turns out certain Nvidia drivers ("71" and "96") are
not compatible with the new version of Xorg used in 8.10. Also, the live/
install CD would not boot unless acpi was turned off as a boot parameter
("acpi=off"). This resulted in things not working, such as not powering
down completely. I suspect a kernel issue.

But I'm not complaining. For the time being, the laptop works just
perfectly (with accelerated 3D graphics) on Xubuntu 8.04.

However, I did put 8.10 on an old (2004) AMD desktop with ATI graphics,
and it worked flawlessly. I'm impressed.

Benjamin Walkenhorst wrote:[color=blue]
> Now that Ubuntu 8.10 has been released, I wonder if I should upgrade
> my desktop. Since 8.04 is an LTS release, I am not exactly in a
> hurry, but I still wonder.[/color]

I'll send this along just in case you missed my posting earlier today:

[url]http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21448/1154/[/url]

Hello,

Thank you very much for your input!
It is good to hear that an upgrade is likely to work fine, then again my system is working really well currently, so I am not in a hurry and can wait for a convenient moment.

Thanks again,
Best wishes,
Benjamin

On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:14:21 +0100, Benjamin Walkenhorst
<krylon@gmx.net> wrote:
[color=blue]
>Looking forward to hearing about your experiences[/color]

My experience was awful. I have several non-production machines I
fool around with. I did the network update from 8.04 to 8.10 on three
machines. On two there were a few error messages, and on the third a
large number of them. One update caused minor damage, and the other
two were a disaster. Basically, I'd be looking at 3 complete
reinstallations. In a production setup, this would be a disaster.
Here, it didn't really matter. So if you really care about your
Ubuntu setup, I'd be wary of doing this upgrade, at least for now.

Since all three installs had to be done over, I replaced Ubuntu with
SuSE 11. One thing I noticed was that on on one of my machines which
had the famous Adobe Flash browser crash problem that I never was able
to solve, that problem went away completely. Dunno why only the one
machine of three was afflicted that way under Ubuntu 8.04-8.10, but
the issue resolved.

One of the machines is a 5 year old HP junker with an ATI 9600 (rv350)
display adapter that I never could get to work under Linux in 3D with
Envy, direct download from ATI, lots of xorg.conf trials, etc. I can't
figure out what happened differently, but when SuSE got through, it
works great. Even does Google Earth OK. That's the first time ever.
The other machines have nVidia.

I've been having my Windows friends try Ubuntu since it has worked so
well and installs easily. That's worked out really well. But I told
them not to upgrade yet to 8.10.

Ian Pawson illuminated alt.os.linux.ubuntu by typing:
[color=blue]
> <snip>
> There are problems with the keyring and network manager. If you store
> your wpa key then you have to unlock the keyring at bootup before it can
> connect to your wireless network. Similarly, if you use its VPN, you can
> NEVER recover the password from the keyring (gives No VPN secrets error).
>
> It would seem to me that this release has been rushed out before bugs
> have been fixed, My advice is to stick to 8.04 unless you NEED something
> that 8.10 has upgraded (such as flash 10, GIMP 2.6.x)[/color]

Actually, that's not a bug, it's there by design.

Simply follow the instructions below to auto connect...

You need to ensure the system setting tick box is enabled in
nm-applet. Then re-enter your password. Click OK and then allow
nm-applet access to the default keyring.

--
People always ask me, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" Well, I
don't have an alibi." ~ Emo Philips

Arrowcatcher wrote:[color=blue]
> On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:14:21 +0100, Benjamin Walkenhorst
> <krylon@gmx.net> wrote:[/color]
[color=blue]
> Since all three installs had to be done over, I replaced Ubuntu with
> SuSE 11.[/color]


Am actually thinking about switching over to openSUSE 11 myself...got a
buglet adding the "guest additions" for it in a Virtualbox session that
I want to resolve first though. Nice thing about using Virtualbox
though is that one can pretty much any OS they want on demand so I doubt
very much if will totally stop using Ubuntu. :-)

In <gev8ug$qe8$1@registered.motzarella.org> propman:

[Snip...]
[color=blue]
> I doubt very much if will totally stop using Ubuntu. :-)[/color]

With my tin foil hat squarely in place, to me there's an air of an M$droid
threatened by Ubuntu, and astroturfing for SuSE instead, in this thread.

Jez sayin'...

--
Regards, Weird (Harold Stevens) * IMPORTANT EMAIL INFO FOLLOWS *
Pardon any bogus email addresses (wookie) in place for spambots.
Really, it's (wyrd) at airmail, dotted with net. DO NOT SPAM IT.
I toss GoogleGroup posts from gitgo ([url]http://improve-usenet.org[/url]).

Harold Stevens wrote:[color=blue]
> In <gev8ug$qe8$1@registered.motzarella.org> propman:
>
> [Snip...]
>[color=green]
>> I doubt very much if will totally stop using Ubuntu. :-)[/color]
>
> With my tin foil hat squarely in place, to me there's an air of an M$droid
> threatened by Ubuntu, and astroturfing for SuSE instead, in this thread.
>
> Jez sayin'...
>[/color]

Go get your tin foil hat resized.........*plonk*

In <gevbs0$j03$1@registered.motzarella.org> propman:

[Snip...]
[color=blue]
> Go get your tin foil hat resized.........*plonk*[/color]

Wow. If it helps, your sense of humor might be over there --------->

--
Regards, Weird (Harold Stevens) * IMPORTANT EMAIL INFO FOLLOWS *
Pardon any bogus email addresses (wookie) in place for spambots.
Really, it's (wyrd) at airmail, dotted with net. DO NOT SPAM IT.
I toss GoogleGroup posts from gitgo ([url]http://improve-usenet.org[/url]).

Moog wrote:[color=blue]
> Ian Pawson illuminated alt.os.linux.ubuntu by typing:
>[color=green]
>> <snip>
>> There are problems with the keyring and network manager. If you store
>> your wpa key then you have to unlock the keyring at bootup before it can
>> connect to your wireless network. Similarly, if you use its VPN, you can
>> NEVER recover the password from the keyring (gives No VPN secrets error).
>>
>> It would seem to me that this release has been rushed out before bugs
>> have been fixed, My advice is to stick to 8.04 unless you NEED something
>> that 8.10 has upgraded (such as flash 10, GIMP 2.6.x)[/color]
>
> Actually, that's not a bug, it's there by design.
>
> Simply follow the instructions below to auto connect...
>
> You need to ensure the system setting tick box is enabled in
> nm-applet. Then re-enter your password. Click OK and then allow
> nm-applet access to the default keyring.
>[/color]

This did, indeed, fix the wireless start-up problem but not the VPN one.
This is a bug that was raised as far back as early September (alpha 6)
and has not been fixed.

In order to get the mn-applet to display it was necessary to delete all
but the top 2 lines from the /etc/network/interfaces file. For me, using
fixed IP addresses, it means that they are not persistent after a reboot
ie it always reverts to DHCP

"Arrowcatcher" wrote:[color=blue]
> Benjamin Walkenhorst wrote:
>
> One thing I noticed was that on on one of my machines which
> had the famous Adobe Flash browser crash problem that I never
> was able to solve, that problem went away completely. Dunno
> why only the one machine of three was afflicted that way under
>Ubuntu 8.04-8.10, but the issue resolved.[/color]

If that machine had a PII CPU and version 9.0115 or 90.124
of Flash Player, Flash was issuing a non-existent instruction
("pushfw" if remember correctly) to the CPU. That is fixed in
version 10 of Flash Player, so if in switching to SUSE you updated
to version 10 of Flash Player, that could explain it - if the CPU was
a Pentium II.

*TimDaniels*

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 08:16:29 -0800, Arrowcatcher wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:14:21 +0100, Benjamin Walkenhorst
> <krylon@gmx.net> wrote:
>[color=green]
>>Looking forward to hearing about your experiences[/color]
>
> My experience was awful. I have several non-production machines I fool
> around with. I did the network update from 8.04 to 8.10 on three
> machines. On two there were a few error messages, and on the third a
> large number of them. One update caused minor damage, and the other two
> were a disaster. Basically, I'd be looking at 3 complete
> reinstallations. In a production setup, this would be a disaster. Here,
> it didn't really matter. So if you really care about your Ubuntu setup,
> I'd be wary of doing this upgrade, at least for now.
>
> Since all three installs had to be done over, I replaced Ubuntu with
> SuSE 11. One thing I noticed was that on on one of my machines which
> had the famous Adobe Flash browser crash problem that I never was able
> to solve, that problem went away completely. Dunno why only the one
> machine of three was afflicted that way under Ubuntu 8.04-8.10, but the
> issue resolved.
>
> One of the machines is a 5 year old HP junker with an ATI 9600 (rv350)
> display adapter that I never could get to work under Linux in 3D with
> Envy, direct download from ATI, lots of xorg.conf trials, etc. I can't
> figure out what happened differently, but when SuSE got through, it
> works great. Even does Google Earth OK. That's the first time ever.
> The other machines have nVidia.
>
> I've been having my Windows friends try Ubuntu since it has worked so
> well and installs easily. That's worked out really well. But I told
> them not to upgrade yet to 8.10.[/color]

I've had problems with 8.10 shutting down (3 minutes) on two different
machines with two different downloads and burnings of 8.10. A clean
install with a check of the MD5 sum. I have no idea as to why. A very
annoying problem. I've never had this problem with Ubuntu. I'm sticking
with 8.04.

On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:17:24 -0800, propman <propman@propmeup.ca>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>Am actually thinking about switching over to openSUSE 11 myself...got a
>buglet adding the "guest additions" for it in a Virtualbox session that
>I want to resolve first though. Nice thing about using Virtualbox
>though is that one can pretty much any OS they want on demand so I doubt
>very much if will totally stop using Ubuntu. :-)[/color]

I just posted the fix for that in alt.os.linux.suse. Ubuntu just
slips right into VirtualBox, but the base SuSE install lacks build
extensions. So Guest Additions can't recompile the kernel. SuSE has a
jillion development options, so it took me some screwing around to
boil the VirtualBox problem down.

So on this Windows XP machine I have both an Ubuntu and SuSE 11 VM in
VirtualBox. Don't have to do either/or. I'm in a position where I
need to evaluate OSs.

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 11:48:55 -0800, "Timothy Daniels"
<SpamBucket@NoSpamPlease.biz> wrote:
[color=blue]
> If that machine had a PII CPU and version 9.0115 or 90.124
>of Flash Player, Flash was issuing a non-existent instruction
>("pushfw" if remember correctly) to the CPU. That is fixed in
>version 10 of Flash Player, so if in switching to SUSE you updated
>to version 10 of Flash Player, that could explain it - if the CPU was
>a Pentium II.[/color]

It's an AMD Athlon XP 3200+. I updated to Flash version 10. I could
never get it to work on that one machine. It's a mystery. For
whatever reason, this was not an issue in my SuSE 11 install. Now
maybe, I could've done a fresh 8.10 install instead of just updating
8.04. That might have resolved the problem.

On Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:20:14 +0000, arnold <arnold@alltel.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
>I've had problems with 8.10 shutting down (3 minutes) on two different
>machines with two different downloads and burnings of 8.10. A clean
>install with a check of the MD5 sum. I have no idea as to why. A very
>annoying problem. I've never had this problem with Ubuntu. I'm sticking
>with 8.04.[/color]

I told my friends to wait before doing the upgrade. However, one of
them didn't wait and upgraded 8.04 to 8.10 within his VirtualBox
install, and it has worked without any issues. However, he hasn't
really dug into the situation yet. There may be issues lurking for
all I know. My experience was awful on three different desktops.

Arrowcatcher wrote:
[color=blue]
> I told my friends to wait before doing the upgrade. However, one of
> them didn't wait and upgraded 8.04 to 8.10 within his VirtualBox
> install, and it has worked without any issues. However, he hasn't
> really dug into the situation yet. There may be issues lurking for
> all I know. My experience was awful on three different desktops.
>[/color]


What do you suppose is the common denominator? ;-)

Hint: It isn't Ubuntu -- because your friend had no issues.

Hint: It isn't your PC -- because you used three different desktops.

Personally, I can't see any sane reason to "upgrade" 8.04 LTS with a
non-LTS version, unless you really need something to work that won't
work with 8.04.

If you just feel you must have the "latest and greatest," then you need
to seriously define "greatest" -- if it won't work for you, it's broken.

The "cutting edge" is very sharp, so expect a few cuts and bruises now
and then.

You are a "leader" and also need to remember that the trail is not yet
made. You can easily fall off a cliff, drown in a river, be
snake-bitten, ....

What do pioneers do? They climb back up the bluff, swim to shore, suck
out the poison -- and keep trying! They know that quitters never win.

Enjoy it while you can. One day you will be old, grumpy, and will not
care about anything important. Your wife will be old and ugly, your back
will hurt, you won't comb your hair (if you have any), and you will
likely have bladder problems. ;-)

Ubuntu "problems" are simple challenges, like working on puzzles,
scoring at sporting events, and maybe waking up every day alive with a
pulse, and not getting run over in traffic.


--
John

No Microsoft, Apple, AT&T, Intel, Novell, Trend Micro, nor Ford products were used in the preparation or transmission of this message.

The EULA sounds like it was written by a team of lawyers who want to tell me what I can't do. The GPL sounds like it was written by a human being, who wants me to know what I can do.

Arrowcatcher wrote:[color=blue]
> On Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:17:24 -0800, propman <propman@propmeup.ca>
> wrote:
>[color=green]
>> Am actually thinking about switching over to openSUSE 11 myself...got a
>> buglet adding the "guest additions" for it in a Virtualbox session that
>> I want to resolve first though. Nice thing about using Virtualbox
>> though is that one can pretty much any OS they want on demand so I doubt
>> very much if will totally stop using Ubuntu. :-)[/color]
>
> I just posted the fix for that in alt.os.linux.suse. Ubuntu just
> slips right into VirtualBox, but the base SuSE install lacks build
> extensions. So Guest Additions can't recompile the kernel. SuSE has a
> jillion development options, so it took me some screwing around to
> boil the VirtualBox problem down.[/color]

Thanks for the update. I actually got the guest additions working fine
(haven't seen your fix message yet) and as I mentioned before am quite
impressed with openSuse; now I'm looking forward to the update that is
to be release in a couple of months. :-)

Thanks again for the reply.. :-)