Good share,you article very great, very usefull for us…thank you

I had a scare when I did upgrade my ubuntu/kubuntu system: it was something related to Grub, cause the install could not find where to install, even when there was clearly a /boot partition. After a moment of panic and hesitation, I opted to put the grub in two partitions. Crosed my fingers and this time could reboot.
Seriously, it is becoming dangerous to even update a ubuntu/kubuntu, the risk of spoiling the system completely by bugs introduced is higher than before. Next time, probably I will switch back to Debian, THAT is a rock solid system, compared to ubuntu.

I had a scare when I did upgrade my ubuntu/kubuntu system: it was something related to Grub, cause the install could not find where to install, even when there was clearly a /boot partition. After a moment of panic and hesitation, I opted to put the grub in two partitions. Crosed my fingers and this time could reboot.
Seriously, it is becoming dangerous to even update a ubuntu/kubuntu, the risk of spoiling the system completely by bugs introduced is higher than before. Next time, probably I will switch back to Debian, THAT is a rock solid system, compared to ubuntu.

I believe your problems with OpenOffice may have something to do with Memory.

Check out the article http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu

On my machine it is now sub-second to open a document!

I did the upgrade and my grub installation was FUBARed. Booted the live CD, chroot'ed and re-installed GRUB. That fixed everything except my window decorator wasn't running (no borders or title bars on windows). I chucked in the towel and did a full install. Luckily I have a two drive system with my home on the second drive. This makes reinstalling a breeze. Just install, create each user in the same order to keep the same user-id (for permissions) and everything is as it was before.

Anyway after the fresh install the window decorator problem was still there. As it turns out gnome stores all sorts of stuff in its config directories in your home folder. After a bit of hunting and killing of hidden folders I was back on track.

I must say I really love this new version Ubuntu. Very slick looking with a nice set of applications.

I used Ubuntu for a while on a Pentium 4. Eventually one of the upgrades 'broke' the system and it ended in a nightmare. I managed to get all my files and email off and then reinstalled Mepis. This was recommended by Geoff a long time ago and I have used it before trying Ubuntu. It installed like a charm and has been great ever since. This is a great distro and I encourage others to try it. There is now a cut down version called AntiX that is supposed to work on even older architecture. Take a look at wwww.mepis.org. There are 64 bit versions that I have running on a dual core processor. Same experience but a lot faster.

My two upgrades on old machines (Acer Celeron i915 and Acer AMD Athlon X1300) took is about 2 hours both. Just one thing disappeared - I lost autologin...

The keyboard/mouse problem sounds like bug #555169.

The last time UPGRADE worked for me I was moving from VAX/VMS 2x to 3x. The upgrade processing left several files fragmented due to the small available disk space. The installer noticed and warned me that reboot would be impossible with those fragmented files. I fixed those few files, ran the sanity check, did reboot, and was happy. That was 19 Eighty Something (appologies to the singer and song writer).

Until we stop using GLOB and similar wildcard processing and build a new system in layers -- hardware, cold-iron kernel, drivers and modules, smarter kernel, system services, application services, initialization process(es) -- we will continue to have failed UPGRADES.

~~~ 8d;-Dan

That's the downside of 6 months release model,use only rolling release distros,(
they are a few,Debian Testing,Arch,PCLinuxOS)the quality is superior in comparison to those that releases every six months,and the most important software is always up to date!

I upgraded my kubuntu system on the release date and it went better than expected. Only issue I have is with the boot splash is pretty ugly, after that, all is gravy.

I'm currently moving my boxes to ArchLinux. But I've been with Ubuntu since Warty Warthog and in all that time I've only done two complete reinstalls both due to a hardware change.

Upgrades have always worked well for me.

I've decided to switch to Arch because of all the crap surrounding Ubuntu these days, the window button switch and the general direction of Ubuntu and Gnome towards less and less configurability.

Arch is great on my desktop, but its not infallible. My first test install on a Thinkpad T61 Ubuntu 9.10/Virtualbox went flawlessly. So I installed on my desktop. That went fine, but quickly ran into trouble when I upgraded pacman. So I reinstalled. So far Arch/XFCE is sweet. I'm using my desktop almost as much as my laptop.

emk

Mr. "Tux Love",
One thing I notice is that you don't have any mention of what was your machine running before the upgrade. Could it have been Kubuntu 8.04? The documentation at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades/Kubuntu

specifically indicates that this version Upgrade is for Kubuntu 9.10 and
is not for 8.04. "Please note: upgrading from 8.04 (Hardy Heron) is NOT supported".

Another thing you don't mention is your hardware. That couldn't really be the issue since the LiveCD worked for and you finally got it working, which indicates that Kubuntu recognized your hardware. But you might have modified your hardware configs (xorg.cfg). Also, What might have been the problem is you previously hacked the heck out of your system/KDE configurations. Or when the upgrade asked you to delete obsolete configurations or apps., you just didn't oblige. It also could have been your KDE configurations in .kde hidden directory. As a hint for the future, you could avoid such issues by creating a new user, or rename your .kde to allow KDE to create a new one for you, which would be totally compatible with the new version of KDE 4.x. There were many changes in KDE 4.x lately.

I don't know how familiar you are with Kubuntu Linux; obviously you are not that familiar.

Next time, try keeping your system up to date and rolling upgrade will work nicely for you just like it did for me without any single major issue on 5 computers (desktops & laptops) I have at home. The only problem I had upgrading from 9.10 is what you encountered in disappearing panel, which is a snap to re-create. There have been many changes in the panel widgets lately.

Try to be more prepared next time before you do a version upgrade.

For those posters bad mouthing Kubuntu, How can I believe you when I have been running Kubuntu for the last 4 years and haven't encountered or experienced your assessments?

To me, although I disagree with some of the political and strategic decisions Canonical takes, Kubuntu has been a pleasure and I believe it is the best Linux distro around.

well... maybe I was lucky... no problem upgrading Ubuntu on laptop and Kubuntu (from 9.10 to 10.04 RC) on the pc.

Had a similar experience with standard Ubuntu. Some update of udev broke, and I was left without keyboard and mouse under X11. Unplugging the mouse made it going, but this wasn't possible for the builtin keyboard. Appearantly Xorg cannot fall back on default mouse and keyboard drivers, because the standard drivers are not there anymore. Now Ubuntu just ships with the event* driver, which makes only udev/hal devices available. Rather than fixing this (apt update did little for me), I just reinstalled from scratch. For an LTS that's the bestion option anyways.

So Ubuntu does the right thing with displacing hal. But the transition is not graceful. And udev and dbus still don't seem to provide a hardened or reliable Desktop Linux. I appreciate the automatisms, but the generic Linux distribution got more Windows-like; weak back, under-the-hood complexity; IMO.

>a dead monitor.
>That's just a Grub2 setting.

You gave me some good LULZ right there. I would have figured xorg to be the problem. Mostly because xorg is the graphical server. You know, the one that controls the monitor.

Actually all of your problems had to do with xorg. As long as your system boots, despite the graphical interface, then your problem is a bad xorg configuration file.

Sadly, this is the kind of issue that the Windows users point out (exploit) when they start explaining why the won't try Linux. Of course, the flip side is the same stuff happens if you try and UPGRADE a windows installation. Clean installs are the way to go, put data on externals, back up personal info and start fresh.

Deb-based distros like Ubuntu, Debian, gNewSense, Trisquel (my current distro of choice), etc. have this issue, that if your upgrade fails your system is stuck in some weird limbo mode. It's happened to me, and I've learned - wait. After the upgrade comes out, just wait. Like a week, or two, or three. Wait for the server to stop being pounded by everyone downloading. Then upgrade calmly, safely, and quickly. As for your current problems, purge the packages causing problems then reinstall them (via Synaptic it's known as a "complete unininstall"). You can also try to sudo dpkg-reconfigure any package that may be misbehaving - a fresh configuration of it can sometimes solve everything related to it.

It's always sad to hear of troubles. I upgraded my mother's computer over the weekend and it was a little bit rocky. After the first reboot, I'd only get a blinking cursor after Grub. I was able to use single-user mode to run dpkg and configure a couple hundred packages that needed it.
I always do a fresh install on my laptop -- not because of upgrade nightmares but because I'm still pretty new to Linux and I tend to make mistakes, which are most easily wipe out with a new install.

It's always sad to hear of troubles. I upgraded my mother's computer over the weekend and it was a little bit rocky. After the first reboot, I'd only get a blinking cursor after Grub. I was able to use single-user mode to run dpkg and configure a couple hundred packages that needed it.
I always do a fresh install on my laptop -- not because of upgrade nightmares but because I'm still pretty new to Linux and I tend to make mistakes, which are most easily wipe out with a new install.

After upgrading my Kubuntu to Lucid a month ago I experienced sound problems - it was almost impossible to talk on Skype or other VOIP clients. Well, I switched to PCLinuxOS - everything works fine and it seems to be faster and more responsive than Kubuntu.

For years I have run Windows with VMware to run Linux and FreeBSD. This 10.04 changes that. I run Desktop AMD64 and WOW, it is sweet. Fast and stable. I also started to use Oracle VirtualBox instead of VMware to run FreeBSD and Windows7.

I find I run Windows7 about every 3 days. Pretty much everything I want is now here.

Thanks to the Ubuntu team. Well done.

BTW, I installed fresh.

Sadly, this isn't how Linux operates on the whole, but this is how Ubuntu/Kubuntu often operate. Canonical is a fairly small company that is trying to have the largest package repositories, living on the bleeding edge, and be stable at the same time. They don't have the staff to accomplish all three. Because of this, they often have seriously broken packages.

This LTS release (which people equate to being more stable, which it isn't) featured a lot of hackery to backport 1.8 xorg-server features back to 1.7, which made zero sense. If I had to wager a guess, you didn't have working input because some of the xorg packags installed, and some didn't, leading to a broken xorg environment, which is why your video driver also didn't install.

I agree this is largely a problem of Ubuntu's "we release every six months, no matter what" philosophy. If you're a KDE user, you *really* shouldn't use Kubuntu, because it is the worst KDE distro out there. I'd seriously consider giving openSUSE a try.

Firstly I think you are always better off at a command prompt and doing it with apt-get dist-upgrade the dist part is vitally important. Oldschool Debian, but generally reliable.

Secondly i think you really need a clean install. I start up in recovery mode and rename my home folder to something like geoff.old and then do a clean install with same user name. Of course you need a separate home partition to do this. I have found that using config files for old versions is not good practice. Once install done just drag and drop all your docs, music videos, firefox and thunderbird folders from geoff.old and you are up and running in no time. Luckily all your programs are just a Synaptic click away.

@marcias - ever tried upgrading from XP to Windows 7 - double LOL.

@Hussam Al-Tayeb,

Actually rolling release is even worse (Arch for example). Because the policy is "release when available". There is no quality in the equation, so if you upgrade (this is easy, I admit) you get all new, exciting, bugs.

That's because (in short):
a) you can keep _your_ version or upgrade to the latest (binary choice), if I remember right for example KDE3 was replaced by KDE4 as soon as it was released, because it was "newer"

b) rolling release does not address any issue with dependencies (PCBSD does)

c) (b) leads to problems with keeping several versions of the same program

ad.b) this means also, then even I managed to keep KDE3 I could be force to upgrade to KDE4 because of some other tool required it

So, PCBSD is rather closer to provide good solution, not Arch. It is simply "bleeding edge" approach, which is not suitable at all for me.

"If this is how Linux behaves, I'd rather use windows. lol"

go LOL yourself asshole.

Upgrading existing K/Ubuntu just doesnt work, never has, period. I have tried several time on different hardware and broken systems is all I ever got.
Do yourself a favor and format/install the fresh new version. Saves hours of stress and is much quicker in the end.

I have just upgraded 4 machines to Ubuntu Lucid and that went better than any previous upgrades. Obviously, mileage may vary.

macias, no. This is how a badly make distribution release works.

I for example, don't touch Ubuntu or any 6 months release distribution.

I use Archlinux. It runs like a dream. same installation since 2006 and no reinstalls or problems. install once..update forever. that's how a rolling release distribution works.

Stable release distributions will always be under pressure to release every 6 months. They have to add too much polish that eventually causes breakage.

You could use windows of course. you have the freedom to do so. But take it from someone who has been using many operating systems since mid 80s, Linux is more ready for the home desktop.

Another thought occurs: One of the things I've found can screw up KDE on a distro upgrade is leftover hidden configuration files in the user directory. The upgrade tries to preserve those files since they contain the customizations you've made to your settings, but it appears they can sometimes be incompatible with the new desktop release, leading to problems. On one client's machine, which he accidentally upgraded, (I had advised him not to use the feature, but Canonical makes it way too easy for an end user to make the mistake), everything seemed fine until, a month or so later, the machine started locking up and having display problems. The hidden files in the user's /home directory had blossomed to many gigabytes and he was all but out of disk space, while the configurations were clearly corrupt.

Also it's not a good idea to update while you're using the GUI. Go to tty1/stop kdm/then update.

Second solution: Reinstall the nvidia driver since when xserver updated it overwrote the glx module. Change the "nvidia" part in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to vesa or nv to get into kdm and then sort out what the problem is by looking in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log & .old.

Killer solution: reinstall evdev and the xserver-input-mouse. Look into Xorg.0.log to see why the mouse isn't being detected.

You should probably already have some experience with fixing the above problems depending on how long you've been using ubu.

"Errors were encountered while processing:"
dpkg --configure -a

Xubuntu...Upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04

Encountered Bug 1:
=> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunar/+bug/520118

Encountered Bug 2:
=> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/policykit-1/+bug/546992

Encountered Bug 3:
=> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/azureus/+bug/543366

Encountered Bug 4:
=> Wireless connections with Network Manager fails after a short period. Had to uninstall and replace it with WICD.

Things to note?
(1) Fresh install is less troubling...But won't save you from all the issues.

(2) Canonical needs to address their issues with all these "niggles". There's a complete lack of quality control here. They need to revamp their debugging and testing process.

It feels like this version is slightly worse than the last...And this one is labeled LTS! (ie: Its supposed to be more stable!)

Are they just pushing out releases to meet deadlines, regardless of quality?

This doesn't sound like a good experience. I've never had a successful upgrade in by Kubuntu installs but since moving to Debian Sid with KDE4, things couldn't be better. Good luck.

I've tried the K/Ubuntu upgrade path on about a half-dozen occasions with a variety of versions, both older and recent. It has hosed the system every time, sometimes rendering it unbootable.

Now, I always use a separate /home partition and do a reinstall to upgrade.

Sad (because I am Linux user), but your story is not that unusual. The quality of Linux distributions is tragic, and even authors of distros don't care if their product even installs/upgrades properly, while in reality it should be HOLDRELEASE issues.

I use opensuse and in years I learned how many regressions are introduced with each version, so I upgrade rarely.

I hope, at some day, we get distro in which any user could upgrade not entire distro but this or that package (including core system). Independently of anything else (it is not rolling release model). PCBSD is promising, but, hilarious, it does not install on my box.

For now, we have to deal with this "release often" cr*p (yes, I am aware of debian and "release when ready") meaning I better have outdated system, but reliable.

If this is how Linux behaves, I'd rather use windows. lol