Share with the community your Karmic Koala install/upgrade experience

[der_joachim]

I've been using Kubuntu since its first version, 5.04 or something. I did several clean installs and many, many urgrades. ATM, my only Kubuntu box is my work laptop. My other PCs have moved on to another distro, but I do not want to go offtopic.

Since I do not have the time to do a clean install, I decided to do a dist-upgrade. It was a disaster.

As with earlier versions, the recommended way to upgrade is to use the KDE update manager. As with earlier versions it crashed horribly. Note to developers: please do not recommend using an unstable upgrade tool!

The first boot was a complete and utter failure. My root partition was a bit of the Schroedinger persuasion: it did not know whether it existed and whether it was writable (it decided not to be to be sure). A fsck did the trick though. After a few runs, my root partition mounted and I continued setting up all half-installed packages.

Xorg worked perfectly! Oh no! It did not! At boot, X starts in low graphics mode. The xorg log file shows only one warning about an invalid font path, and the rest appears to be perfect. After logging in on the console and restarting KDM, xorg works swimmingly!

Sound worked OK, but only after having discovered that it is amplified 4x or something. Now, my volume level is at 30%-ish and the sound is acceptable.

My fonts were screwed up badly. The KDE fonts were tiny, whereas the GTK fonts were huge.

Subversion suddenly needed a gnome-keyring password. I never installed any gnome stuff and I never asked for yet another security (?) layer. I uninstalled any keyring-related stuff that never should have been there in the first place.

Two things that are missing in my Kubuntu install, but are not particularly missed: a decent startup screen (still the old blue-logo-on-black-background), and grub2.

/var/lib/dpkg/status was borked and it refused any installing, deinstalling or upgrading. Nice work! I had to manually hack it.

All in all, almost every problem was solved, but it took me a lot of time. I still have a few nagging problems, and maybe a clean install will be a better idea next time. It won't be a Canonical distribution though.

[Melk79]

I upgraded my old Dell Dimension 4500S and actually saw some improvement. Intrepid and Jaunty only produced a black splash screen on startup and shutdown, now I have the new splash screen on a seven year old computer. That's nice.

I originally upgraded my laptop to the beta and moved to Kubuntu. There are a lot of things that I like about KDE, but I still find getting around it to involve to many clicks and menus. I'm probably just too used to GNOME. After the final upgrade to Kubuntu, there were some problems I just didn't want to troubleshoot. I was getting a "one or more mounts cannot yet be mounted" at startup and then the icons for shutdown, logout and restart just disappeared. I said forget it and installed Ubuntu Karmic fresh. No issues, works great. The whole sync/async notification positions is an interesting discussion. I have to agree with most that without learning of it ahead of time, it seems like a bug when system notifications appear an inch or so lower than the panel.

[comictrio]

I'm very disappointed with Karmic Koala. I upgraded within 9.04 and received a lot of errors. After rebooting, the system was unusable. The 9.10 upgrade defaults to the older kernel and fails to see my second hard drive. I downloaded and did a full install ofKarmic Koala and had the same results that the upgrade caused.

As a system builder, I have several very upset Ubuntu customers because they upgraded to 9.10 and now they have unusable computers. I advised my customers to reinstall 9.04 and wait until the problems with Karmic Koala are resolved.

I've been a Ubuntu user since the very first distribution and a long time Linux user since Linux was made available. I'm hoping the problems with Karmic Koala are resolved soon.

[Duncan J Murray]

I did a clean install of karmic, which seemed to go find until I hit this pretty major bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/403408

which meant that it would not boot at all.

I was forced to reinstall jaunty, and download the alternate cd, reinstall karmic and then it all worked again!

Apart from that major problem, karmic has been a pleasure to use.

Plusses:
1. Sound works very well, and seems to be given higher priority - no skipping.
2. Graphics are better - slicker on my laptop.
3. boot up is quicker.

Negatives:
1. This problem with the grub
2. flash seems to be a bit slow again (a problem which was sorted out on jaunty)
3. occasional crash when I started using it, now seems to have stopped.

Overall, I'm happy. But I could see how others might be tearing their hair out!

Duncan.

[Dedoimedo]

Not good so far.

Installed on 5 machines, 2 had media + sound issues with PulseAudio that I was not able to remedy, including esound, alsa > oss4, and similar. With PA running, videos +flash are running too fast and the sound is garbled. When it's removed, videos are running fine, but there's no sound, trying to open the sound menu never completes, waiting for sound system to respond forever.

What more, installing Flash from Medibuntu did not work, from Adobe site it did.

Then, I had the disk crash issue in live CD, this was already reported, plus three GParted crashes. This is more befitting alphas or betas than the official release.

Overall, it's a huge disappointment. 6-month releases are too fast for thorough QA checks. I'd prefer to see one annual release with more stability.

Regards,
Dedoimedo

[Stufu]

The live CD made problems (desktop was not displayed, or froze). I installed anyway, from the Alternate CD. First start: Login not possible to be frozen. 've Given up.

Notebook AMILO M7400 (Fujitsu Siemens)

[britlion]

Every six months, I give ubuntu a try. Every six months I find the experience so frustrating that it lasts about a week before I reinstall windows.

This time I was more cagey. I decided to dedicate a chunk of virtual space to Karmic and run with that full screen to see if I can get used to using linux that way.

The 9.10 i386 disc won't boot in vmware. It locks up in text mode after about 10 seconds.

This is such an enormous problem that I would have expected to show up in testing that my trust in canonical just about hit zero. I was considering Mint, but since that's based on the Ubuntu tree, I can't see how I can go there.

Windows 7 for the win, then

[Flyers2391]

I installed over Intrepid on my desktop on Jaunty on my laptop, no problems with either one. Wireless, video cards both were picked up as expected. My desktop shuts down so quickly I can't believe it is doing it properly ... by the time I turn my monitor off and push the chair in it's already powered off.

By the way, I set up a separate root and home partition last time I installed, it was a lot easier than I expected. This time I selected manual again, chose the root and home and move quickly. 15 minutes later (install time) I was up, running and happy A few strange quirks but nothing that gets in the way.

[suda]

Nice job, everybody! I so appreciate the hard work you did and the new "stuff" that really improves the online experience. Thanks again! Not sure if anybody else experienced this, but for some reason, the new Evolution is not receiving or sending mail. It just gets hung up. Not a big thing--I can use the Thunderbird mail client--but did anybody else have this happen?

s.

[tomdkat]

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 a couple of days ago and the upgrade went mostly flawlessly. I voted for the "flawless" upgrade since the few issues I've encountered are things I'm not able or interested in fixing.

My only issues thus far:

• The Firefox icon didn't appear in the panel at the top of the screen but that was easy to fix.
• I get kernel crash messages related to an ECC memory issue. This doesn't seem to impact system performance and I've been reporting the crashes as recommended.
• I'm having some issues clicking on items in Flash applets in Opera 10.01 64-bit.

Other than that, this upgrade has been the smoothest upgrade for me _by far_.

Thanks for the due diligence and all the hard work!

Peace...