Re: [BLUG] thoroughly unimpressed with Hardy

I've been performing network upgrades of Debian since 1996-97 or so.
With Debian I never had the sorts of problems I've run in to with some
of my Ubuntu upgrades.

But then, the Debian upgrades generally worked without helper scripts,
and they didn't do some of the major key changes that Ubuntu has done
in the past. I went from a history where (once they developed APT)
manual changes to /etc/apt/sources.list followed by a dist-upgrade
actually worked reliably for distribution upgrades. (It was always
"update distribution tag, then perform upgrade" -- even before APT.)
This bit me hard when Ubuntu stopped using init in the 6.06 -> 6.10
upgrade.

I had trouble in places with the 7.04 -> 7.10 upgrade, (I don't recall
what it was, I just remember it didn't all go completely smoothly), and
I've not fully implemented the 7.10 -> 8.04 upgrade. So far, the one
system I did upgrade worked as expected. I was only doing one system
during the beta. Now it is just a matter of upgrading them when I have
the time.

With my Ubuntu systems, unless I have truly fat bandwith, (like
work-bandwidth, not home cable-modem bandwidth), I've taken to using
the Alternate CD to perform a CD-based upgrade. Having had problems in
the past, it provides an added level of protection. (It is a tool that
can be leveraged to revive a system that you might otherwise think of
reinstalling.)

The big excitement for me will be my LTS upgrade. My desktop is a
6.06 LTS system, which will be upgraded to 8.04 LTS. I'm just holding
out long enough to verify VMware Workstation will work as expected.

With my history, you might think I would agree with the folks that are
all about total reinstallation for distribution upgrades. I, however,
hate performing full reinstallations. I consider reinstallation a sign
of a poorly designed or poorly administered system. (Like Windows, or
RedHat where such policies are the norm.)

I avoid recompiling anything without very explicit need. When I do, I
try to make sure it gets a reasonable '.deb' file so package management
doesn't get confused. The only time I touch GNU Stow (which I do highly
recommend -- it is a great product) is when maintaining my aged Solaris
machine, or (at times) when dealing with third-party software.

I've needed to resort to a full reinstallation of a Debian-derived
system once in the 10+ years I've been using them. In that case, it was
my fault for (1) not reading the installation notes, and (2) failing
to realize the CD-Rom drive was defective earlier. I knew it had CDDA
issues, but I had been using it successfully -- or so I thought -- so I
thought it was *just* CDDA issues. I should've performed a 'media check'
before installing.

Yes, that's right. The one time I performed a full reinstallation
after a botched upgrade of a Debian-derived system, I had CD-Rom drive
hardware issues. The only other times I performed a full reinstallation
instead of a straight upgrade was to make radical partition table
changes. (Most of my minor partition table changes have occured without
a full reinstallation. -- Even before you could dynamically resize ext2
partitions.)

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 10:18:00PM -0400, Joe Auty wrote:
> I'm wondering if any of you have had the problems I've had in a
> network update to Hardy:
>
>
> 1) My Nvidia Geforce 8500 GT cannot be properly probed to determine
> available resolutions, I'm stuck at 640x480 w. the proprietary Nvidia
> driver. Several other users have had this same problem, it's an open
> bug on Launchpad. For now, I'm stuck with the open source driver,
> where I get my full screen resolution, but no 3D acceleration.
>
> 2) Hardy completely messed up my lirc config. Even after recompiling
> the modules (which was necessary), I'm still having problems that
> didn't exist in Gutsy with the lirc_pvr150 kernel module. For now, I'm
> remote-less.
>
> 3) Synergy now needs to be run as root
>
>
>
>
> I'm thinking about downgrading back to Gutsy, but I'm kind of afraid
> to do that... I may have to wipe/reinstall. I guess next time I
> shouldn't count on these upgrades going as smoothly as my upgrade from
> Fiesty to Gutsy did.
>
> Anybody else having these sorts of difficulties?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----------
> Joe Auty
> NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
> http://www.netmusician.org
> joe@netmusician.org
>
>
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> BLUG@linuxfan.com
> http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
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