thelinuxlink.net

That's pretty much how I'd sum it up. I wish like hell I'd stuck with Feisty since 90% of everything I cared about worked on my t43. I upgraded since I was hoping it would take care of a few small nagging issues - it didn't, and the absurd amount of bug injection is, well, totally fucking absurd. So far:

First thing I noticed was that the upgrade ate kmail - I actually already posted about this, and fixed the issue by enabling the kubuntu feisty kde 3.5.8 repos and doing a dist upgrade. Some sort of bullshit library version issue which was simply unfixable otherwise. After doing that I had to reinstall kmail and all of the remaining pieces of kontact that I actually use. For some reason, this insisted on including postfix - WTF postfix? meaning, as long as I've run *buntu, the mail command has never worked, so why the hell would I need an MTA? To *not* mail goddamned logs? Yes, I'm sure this is easily fixable, but still - why the hell do I want/need and MTA on a box that is designed so it doesn't send mail except via clients?

Second - virtual terminals were gone - simply gone. A nice black screen was left in their stead, and adding nosplash to kernel options got you a nice black screen until kdm kicked on. This one was fucking hillarious. It turns out that the *buntu devs decided that framebuffers were bad, or something, so they blaclisted all freaking fb-modules. To fix this, I actually had to remove the line that blacklisted vesafb in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer, add vesafb and fbcon to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and then run update-initramfs. Beautiful, simply beautiful.

Third - for some reason the OSS radeon drivers refused to use direct rendering, claiming my chipset (x300) wasn't supported. I've been using the radeon driver, more often than not, for over a year w/o issue, so I have no idea wtf this was about. No problem, though, just install fglrx, right? Nope. Fglrx now causes hibernate/suspend to fail - super. So, after about 5 hours of fscking with xorg.conf and still no direct rendering, I decide to call it a day and just use 2d accel. Lo and behold, direct rendering works for some bizarre assed reason after the final shutdown/reboot. My xorg config was *exactly* the same as it had always been, so all I can figure is that installing and removing fglx caused kubuntu to tweak some file somewhere. This is great, and only cost me a large chunk of my day, but hibernate is about 50/50 at this point, still.

For some reason anytime anything nees to touck my xorg.conf, it rips out the line dictating that I do not want my synaptics pad to use pad-tapping, which I freaking HATE. I still haven't figured out what the hell is up with that - I need to check the timestamps or something though.

My wireless is randomly dropping offline - the ipw2200 module will still be loaded, but the activity light is dead. I can completely reload Knetworkmanager, etc, and it comes back online for a second or two, but drops off again in 30 seconds or so. This is totally random - it's working fine right now after a reboot, but was plaguing me all afternoon. I suppose this could be a hardware issue, but it seems unlikely.

Etc.

Etc.

Bottom line, unless you have a gigantic need to upgrade, simply don't. Every single issue I hit google for turns up shitloads of bugreports that haven't been addressed and/or forum threads that seem to go nowhere or have total bullshit "fixes" which are hackish workarounds that seem to be endorsed by the community. I'm warming up to hellonorman's outlook daily, it seems...

I normally access my intel ubuntu server box via command line only, but I have not had any real trouble so far. I did go turn on the monitor try the other terminals. I am using fluxbox as a desktop though. They seemed to work fine. on the machines I upgraded from the command line I had no problem. on my g3 the ubuntu desktop acts squirrelly, so I installed kde and everything was solid. i may check the settings for the l unbuntu-desktop in my home directory. On that machine I did the upgrade from the desktop instead of the command line. I will also admit I normally use fedora for my desktop instead of ubuntu.

You might go to the ubuntu forum and ask for help. I find a ton of answers there.
lI am just a inux novice....





http://news.softpedia.com/news/Latest-A ... 1547.shtml

Other than a few odds and ends, I have fixed most things - my point is that they are stupid things to have to fix, and as it remains, this is the single worst ubuntu I've run - I am not at all alone in this opinion. It's a shame, since Feisty was good enough that I had actually gained a lot of confidence in Ubuntu. And I'm guessing you didn't read my opinion of the quality of answers you often get at the ubuntu forums (yes, occasionally you get a decent answer, but more than 75% of what I've seen there or have been told about by people who have tread, and failed to fix their own issue ranges from lame to downright dangerous). I do use that place as a yardstick to see if other people are having the same issue, though.

edit: corrected a brainfart

And, yes, I realize that there is hardly anything less interesting than reading someone else's complaints about an OS upgrade - I got carried away, but guess I needed to vent.

The point to take away from my post is that unless there is a dire reason to upgrade from Feisty, I'd strongly recommend against it.

Listening to you vent your spleen , it sounds like Gusty is the GNU/LINUX Vista

I have some weird issues with Gutsy too, like for some reason my mythtv backend pc always boots up into low graphics mode, I have the nvidia driver install but for some reason it doesnt detect my monitor and graphics card right and even though I personally set them
in xorg.conf every time it reboots it starts over....my frontend doesnt have the problem, but it is hooked up to the tv through s-video

riddlebox wrote:I have some weird issues with Gutsy too, like for some reason my mythtv backend pc always boots up into low graphics mode, I have the nvidia driver install but for some reason it doesnt detect my monitor and graphics card right and even though I personally set them
in xorg.conf every time it reboots it starts over....my frontend doesnt have the problem, but it is hooked up to the tv through s-video

That sounds like a problem with the nvidia driver which is out of Ubuntu's control.

davijordan wrote:http://xkcd.com/349/

.. clasic

Two different machines with fresh installs. One boots up and proceeds to turn the monitor off requiring a mouse move or key press to turn it back on. The other periodically can't run the gnome-settings-manager upon boot. I grow more tired of this shit daily. Fonts are less than ideal on a 19" lcd monitor.

Maybe allix is right and those pesky nvidia people held a gun to their heads and made the ubuntu devs put a non tested driver in the final release of 7.10 and it really isn't in their control.

I have to spend time fucking around with boot up problems on a fresh install and fonts and basic things like booting to a turned on monitor? Really? No Really? Both of these machines have modest amd 3200 era hardware, chipsets and such. Sheesh.

Another update:

For some reason ubuntu has decided that the module for the keyspan usb-to-serial adapter shouldn't be included with new kernels. This nearly totally fucked me today when I needed to get into a cisco device and discovered that my keyspan wasn't working. Luckily, I keep my old kernels and just booted into one of those. I am *extremely* unhappy about this. What the fsck???? For all of the "just works" ubuntu offers, I am seriously sick of the bullshit that comes along with running it. I have real work to get done with my lappy, and I simply cannot have "ethical decisions" made by others interfering with this. Daily, it seems, I am more sympathetic to the claims of those who cite LODT as being nothing more than hobbyist in nature.

Where did you see that? I have access to cisco and extreme switches and need that featture.
I also use serial dumb terminals a lot.

I wouldn't discredit LOTD based on an Ubuntu release. They're adding some good stuff, but I still believe 6 months isn't long enough to properly develop and test a release. I also believe that rolling updates in Ubuntu is asking for trouble. It kind of worked for me with the Edgy to Feisty upgrade, and didn't work well at all for the Feisty to Gutsy upgrade. I'm hoping that Hardy Heron will be far more stable. Basically if they just worked out all the bugs for the Gutsy release, plus some nice Xorg hot plugging feature, I'd be much happier than if they added a ton of new features to Hardy Heron.

I seriously need to try out Slackware...

Davi - I saw that when I plugged in my keyspan usb-to-seial adapter dongle and nothing happened. I then tried to load the module by hand and was told it didn't exist. After ~5-10 min dicking around, I booted back into 2.6.20, and it worked right away. When I got home, I googled around and found at least half a dozen confirmed bug reports and then checked the keyspan site itself where they say this:

Linux Kernel 2.6.x
If you are using a kernel v2.6, Keyspan firmware and drivers are in the 2.6.x. Please note that you may need to recompile your kernel if you did not install the Keyspan drivers when you first installed Linux.

Note:
Linux 2.6 includes full support for Keyspan USB Serial Adapters. In most installs, our drivers (and where needed, firmware) are installed. For most Linux distros (ie Redhat FC6), Keyspan support is enabled by default and your Keyspan USB Serial Adapter will work without you doing anything.

However, certain Linux distros (primarily Ubuntu and Debian) choose to not include a complete install of our drivers and firmware due to philosophical issues with our license text. Although the majority of the Linux community is fine with our license, Ubuntu and Debian require you to install the Keyspan drivers manually. This usually involves downloading the latest Linux kernel for kernel.org and patching or recompiling your kernel to include the complete Keyspan installation. Keyspan does not have instructions for this process at this time. We recommend that you use other distros (such as Redhat). In the future, Keyspan may create documentation to help you in updating Ubuntu and Debian however this documentation is not available at this time.

http://keyspan.com/downloads-files/developer/linux/

As far as I know, this only affects keyspan usb-to-serial adapters.

Vog - I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I do have to admit that after being a passive linux user for the better part of a year, having to do all this shit just to have a working desktop reminds me of the aspect of linux I really hate - breakage, and no thought at *all* paid to backwards compatibility. It is horseshit that things that used to work no longer do from version to version. Regression should not be tolerated, period. I don't care if it's in the name of progress or not - if it is, that "progress" shouldn't take place until the new systems can actually deliver like-for-like compatibility.

Case in point - another recent time when I looked like a fool was when all of a sudden *none* of my modems would work. I needed to dial in to an access server and console in to a device that wasn't responding to network requests. This was actually in Feisty, but my point remains the same. I have a built in modem, admittedly a connexant modem with a blob-based drivers, and 3 different pcmcia modems. All of a sudden, none of the modems worked - the connexant modem created a queryable device node, but it didn't "hear" dialtone when it looked for it. Blame that on the blobular nature of the linuxant driver, fine. All the pcmcia modems would load the various serial modules, but not the actual modem modules, and manually loading the modem modules wouldn't associate them with the modem. These pcmcia cards have worked perfectly for as long as I can remember. In the end, since I was at a remote location and had no other net access, I tried booting in to an old-ass kanotix cd, and sure enough, right away, I had a modem node, and could dial in to the device I needed to. Shit like this is what I'm talking about. It shouldn't be acceptable, and the fact that wen things like this are brough up on various boards the answer, in unison from the "faithful" is almost always "So, how much did you *PAY* for this shitty software?!?!?!" is absolute nonsense. I'm perfectly willing to pay, and always have been, but that's a whole 'nuther issue...

Vogateer wrote:I seriously need to try out Slackware...

For stability, Slack really can't be beat, it is pretty damn solid. My only gripes with Slackware are the fact that there's no official 64-bit version, nor is there an easy way to maintain and upgrade packages a la Portage. Oh, and GNOME is unsupported...