BungaMan
October 17th, 2007, 08:07 AM
Gustsy has disapointed me in several ways. I'm placing my story here for others to learn from and take some precautions when considering the upgrade.
I started the upgrade yesterday 16/10 so what happend would happen with the official release as well. Feisty has been running with Compiz on all the time, stable as a rock and dual screen on the open source ati driver. To be sure I switched to metacity, disabled all 3th party repositories and then started update-manager -d. Kicked the distro upgrade into first gear and let it run.
1. The upgrade suddenly added a toolbar to my screen with the program buttons, out of the blue, at the top and centered, not stretched. I had this toolbar removed before because of using alt-tab with compiz. Nothing serious but definitly not something that shows off quality. (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/153628)
2. During the installation of the packages, several times (guessing about 6) I was asked which file to keep. These were configuration files that I have never touched and didn't even know they existed. I knew what to do here but if but imagine beginners or not-techies.
Solution: Look at it from the 'just works' ((tm) DELL) perspective, it would be better to make a backup and simply replace them. Better yet, make a log of all the special actions taken and make it available on the desktop of the user who performed the upgrade.
The rest of the installation went fine so off to a first reboot and behold... a black screen when booting ending in... a black screen and no more activity. Luckily I have about 10 years of linux experience to get around this.
3. First things first, it seems that the additional boot parameter vga=0x345 is no longer switching my console to a high res but a black screen instead. Yes, it was set as default parameter. It has been working for every other kernel image installed until our gutsy kernel. Removing the parameter gave me back my console output. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/129910)
Solution: Better testing? No idea what caused this issue but a high res console is very useful for admins on the server edition.
Xorg... bulletproof? I must have been dreaming when I read that somewhere.
4. Starting X fails and it does not show me the graphical configuration utility. I have an xorg.conf setup for dual screen using mergedfb. First thing I did was erase xorg.conf, after a backup, because I wanted to its xrandr. I had to anyway. Roughly, Xrandr seems to what people say and I get the right resolution (1280x800) for my laptop LCD, CRT (vga connection to laptop) is cloned with the same resolution and refresh rate (60Hz killing my eyes).
Solution: Make X more bulletproof. It locked up from what I can see in the Xorg.0.log file. Perhaps the upgrade could have had a bit of custom scripting to remove the xorg.conf file and replace it with a default minimal? Or are we not trusting xrandr enough? Then why throw it in the public?
5. My first successful graphical login shows me a top toolbar where all the icons on the right are not visible. Calendar, volume, workspaces, etc... The second time they re-appear.
6. Also at my first graphical login, the window borders are gone! Opening a terminal and typing "metacity --replace" fixes the problem. To my experience this is caused when compiz fails when also switching decoration manager (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/153591)
Solution: Make sure that when Compiz fails, either metacity --replace or the kde equivalent is executed.
7. The graphical tool ("Screens and video"?) comes to a test now... and it fails. It shows my 2 monitors but enabling one disables the other! The monitors are not correctly identified. For my CRT monitor, the only available resolutions are 640x480 and 800x600. In Xorg.0.log I can see that all information can be detected correctly. Clicking OK creates, what seems like, dummy sections in the xorg.conf file. After copy&pasting from the backup file, I now have a xorg.conf file with a basic device section, 2 monitor sections (hoping these will be picked up and used by the tool) and one screen section. Exactly like a single monitor but with the addition of a monitor screen. Still this doesn't help to setup the dual screen with the tool. I have dual screen but only clone output and the CRT refresh rate sticks at 60Hz.
Solution: More documentation on the xrandr implementation in the radeon driver and loads of bugfixing in the graphical tool. This tool just ain't ready yet.
8. Where are the graphical effects in Gutsy??? There are none, not even when I try them with a single screen defined. Everything worked flawlessly with Feisty.
9. My keyboard input at first login was not correct. Probably qwerty in stead of azerty but this was automatically corrected after my first login. (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/136812)
Solution: I still need to work this out.
Conclusion: A zero conf upgrade is still a dream. Even worse, it can still break the installation. I'll take my responsibility and update each point with a bug report in launchpad. I hope you do the same in order to get Ubuntu rock solid for the next release!
<Update>
10. More stuff going wrong... no CPU scaling and stuck to the minimum frequency. This is for Pentium M Dothan CPU's of the model SONOMA as it seems. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/132271)
I started the upgrade yesterday 16/10 so what happend would happen with the official release as well. Feisty has been running with Compiz on all the time, stable as a rock and dual screen on the open source ati driver. To be sure I switched to metacity, disabled all 3th party repositories and then started update-manager -d. Kicked the distro upgrade into first gear and let it run.
1. The upgrade suddenly added a toolbar to my screen with the program buttons, out of the blue, at the top and centered, not stretched. I had this toolbar removed before because of using alt-tab with compiz. Nothing serious but definitly not something that shows off quality. (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/153628)
2. During the installation of the packages, several times (guessing about 6) I was asked which file to keep. These were configuration files that I have never touched and didn't even know they existed. I knew what to do here but if but imagine beginners or not-techies.
Solution: Look at it from the 'just works' ((tm) DELL) perspective, it would be better to make a backup and simply replace them. Better yet, make a log of all the special actions taken and make it available on the desktop of the user who performed the upgrade.
The rest of the installation went fine so off to a first reboot and behold... a black screen when booting ending in... a black screen and no more activity. Luckily I have about 10 years of linux experience to get around this.
3. First things first, it seems that the additional boot parameter vga=0x345 is no longer switching my console to a high res but a black screen instead. Yes, it was set as default parameter. It has been working for every other kernel image installed until our gutsy kernel. Removing the parameter gave me back my console output. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/129910)
Solution: Better testing? No idea what caused this issue but a high res console is very useful for admins on the server edition.
Xorg... bulletproof? I must have been dreaming when I read that somewhere.
4. Starting X fails and it does not show me the graphical configuration utility. I have an xorg.conf setup for dual screen using mergedfb. First thing I did was erase xorg.conf, after a backup, because I wanted to its xrandr. I had to anyway. Roughly, Xrandr seems to what people say and I get the right resolution (1280x800) for my laptop LCD, CRT (vga connection to laptop) is cloned with the same resolution and refresh rate (60Hz killing my eyes).
Solution: Make X more bulletproof. It locked up from what I can see in the Xorg.0.log file. Perhaps the upgrade could have had a bit of custom scripting to remove the xorg.conf file and replace it with a default minimal? Or are we not trusting xrandr enough? Then why throw it in the public?
5. My first successful graphical login shows me a top toolbar where all the icons on the right are not visible. Calendar, volume, workspaces, etc... The second time they re-appear.
6. Also at my first graphical login, the window borders are gone! Opening a terminal and typing "metacity --replace" fixes the problem. To my experience this is caused when compiz fails when also switching decoration manager (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/153591)
Solution: Make sure that when Compiz fails, either metacity --replace or the kde equivalent is executed.
7. The graphical tool ("Screens and video"?) comes to a test now... and it fails. It shows my 2 monitors but enabling one disables the other! The monitors are not correctly identified. For my CRT monitor, the only available resolutions are 640x480 and 800x600. In Xorg.0.log I can see that all information can be detected correctly. Clicking OK creates, what seems like, dummy sections in the xorg.conf file. After copy&pasting from the backup file, I now have a xorg.conf file with a basic device section, 2 monitor sections (hoping these will be picked up and used by the tool) and one screen section. Exactly like a single monitor but with the addition of a monitor screen. Still this doesn't help to setup the dual screen with the tool. I have dual screen but only clone output and the CRT refresh rate sticks at 60Hz.
Solution: More documentation on the xrandr implementation in the radeon driver and loads of bugfixing in the graphical tool. This tool just ain't ready yet.
8. Where are the graphical effects in Gutsy??? There are none, not even when I try them with a single screen defined. Everything worked flawlessly with Feisty.
9. My keyboard input at first login was not correct. Probably qwerty in stead of azerty but this was automatically corrected after my first login. (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/136812)
Solution: I still need to work this out.
Conclusion: A zero conf upgrade is still a dream. Even worse, it can still break the installation. I'll take my responsibility and update each point with a bug report in launchpad. I hope you do the same in order to get Ubuntu rock solid for the next release!
<Update>
10. More stuff going wrong... no CPU scaling and stuck to the minimum frequency. This is for Pentium M Dothan CPU's of the model SONOMA as it seems. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/132271)