how edgy broke my system (detailed)

[mnp5]

Ladies and Gentlemen --

I am proud to present a short narrative detailing how upgrading to edgy broke my system. It goes a little something like this:

1) See that Edgy was released, get excited

2) Read installation documentation. Check for peculiarities with respect to Kubuntu. None seem to present themselves.

3) Follow instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdgyUpgrades. Run gksu "update-manager -c".

4) gksu chugs along nicely, downloading a bunch of files. This takes about an hour -- I was getting 500kb/sec off of the mirrors.

5) All packages download successfully. Unpacking/configuration process begins.

6) During the upgrade, update-manager mentions that /usr/X11R6/bin is going to be replaced with a symlink. Unfortunately I'd installed opera-static, which left its own worthless symlink in /usr/X11R6/bin that update-manager wasn't aware of. Since there's a file in the directory, update-manager refuses to remove and re-link /usr/X11R6/bin and borks out. This is sensible enough. I enter the dir, remove the symlink, purge the package and re-run update-manager.

7) update-manager says that my system is screwed (installation in incomplete state, no packages can be added/removed/whatever).

I start running aptitude in an attempt to get the remaining 500 downloaded but unconfigured packages installed. I probably run aptitude and/or apt six to ten times before I'm able to get things sorted out. This is because of a lot of stupid dependency issues. Several useless packages are purged (by useless I mean things like python-html or whatever).

ps mr. author of the forum software: when someone writes the number eight and puts a closing parenthesis after it, it might just mean "number eight in a list" instead of "idiot smiley with sunglasses." oh well.

9) Finally I get to the point where aptitude/apt isn't doing anything when dist-upgrade is requested. I sigh a long sigh of relief and decide to reboot.

10) On reboot, kernel panic -- grub has somehow gotten the wrong idea about where my root filesystem is. I use software RAID on my desktop machine, so grub really should be looking at root=/dev/md0 instead of root=UUID:some_bunch_of_incoherent_nonsense. I edit the grub command-line and get past the panic, but the system stops booting after loading the ps/2 mouse driver. Why? Possibly because I'm running a custom kernel and the whole damn init system has changed for some reason.

11) I screw with the grub boot parameters until I remember to specify root=/dev/md0 and init=/bin/bash and can at least get a shell -- on a read-only root filesystem, anyways. This allows me to confirm that nothing worse than a grub screwup has taken place.

12) On my next reboot, I notice Edgy has installed 2.6.17.10-386, so I decide to forego booting my custom kernel (did I mention I don't like modules? I don't like modules and build only the drivers I need -- statically) and hit 2.6.17.10-386 instead. I have to specify that root=/dev/md0 instead of UUIDblahblah, but that's ok. The system boots up fine. The only problem is that Firefox 2.0 is buggy as hell, ie. crashes fairly frequently, and the system is now noticeably slower than it was before -- it used to take less than a tenth of a second to open an xterm; now the xterm opens, but I wait .5 for bash to give me a prompt. And no, this system isn't THAT underpowered -- it's an xp3200 with two gigs of RAM. It does now have over 100 modules loaded, however and I've noticed that doing a middle-click copy into nano takes like two seconds to complete. Hurrah.

Now I'm a reasonably adept user, so this wasn't show-stopping for me. Fixing my system after the upgrade did take a while, though, and that was irritating. I don't know what I would have done if I didn't have substantial linux experience already (mind you, if I didn't have substantial linux experience I probably wouldn't be doing weird things like running custom monolithic kernels and software RAID on my desktop box). I can definitely sympathize with the homies who have said "damn, edgy broke everything!" My question is why when update-manager encounters the (predictable) /usr/X11R6/bin problem it halts instead of presenting the option to open a terminal, fix the problem, and then continue the upgrade.

Now I don't want to sound ungrateful or excessively sarcastic. The people who do Ubuntu development have far more technical skill than I do and they produce a product that is more or less better than any other linux distribution. That said, however, it'd be nice if someone would actually test the upgrade process exhaustively before releasing it to the public. Similar nonsense happened to me when I went from hoary (or was it breezy? whatever came right before dapper, anyways) to dapper. The reason why people don't use Linux is because it takes forever to do things that are simple in Windows XP, like get hardware to work or upgrade software on your computer. Ubuntu goes a long way to closing that gap, but unfortunately not nearly long enough.

Oh yeah, one more thing.. anyone have any clue as to wtf the new init binary is actually called and how I can manually call it from grub? I'd like to get back to my non-crap kernel as soon as possible, I expect it might deal with some of the abysmal slowness problems I'm currently experiencing..



best,
mnp5
montreal

[mr_fong]

I was just smiling the whole way through reading your posting. I am using Debian (and Linux for that matter) since 1999, know my way around the system - although I also am no wizkid - but right now I feel like a little kid, not in command of my own toys anymore. Why do these grown-ups screw things up for me every time? --Hans

[Koybe]

Just one thing I can say : 8)
But I can't help you for the other things!

[TheWizzard]

mmm, upgrading is kind of tricky by definition.
it should work painless on a box with standard hardware and very default configuration of ubuntu. but can be hard in other situations.

i have to admit i'm very new to ubuntu. i made my switch just when ubuntu appeared. before ubuntu i used red hat / fedora and i did not upgrade every time because the backports were pretty good and ensured i had the latest packages. i only upgraded when my install was no longer supported.
when i upgrade i always do a clean install to make sure the system is perfectly stable.

because a clean install takes a few hours i'm sticking with dapper at least untill the next version of ubuntu is released and i'm curious to see how the backporting works in ubuntu. i hope it works fine, so that dapper is really a LTS!

[cotcot]

My upgrade from (a fairly buggy) dapper to edgy on an AMD64X2 was spotless just using the instructions of the ubuntu guide.

[theosib]

Re: Software RAID

Are you using RAID 1 or RAID 0?

I had set up a software RAID 1 with Dapper, and when it was all installed, I did some investigating and testing, and I discovered that (a) grub was not installed on the secondary drive, and (b) menu.lst was not set up correctly to be able to boot from the second disk. If I'd had a failure of the primary drive (without manually fixing the problems) I would have been up the creek.

Have you tried pulling power from your primary drive just to see if you could boot from your secondary?

Anyhow, this is just one of the many reasons why I don't think I'm EVER going to try to upgrade to Edgy. I'm sure it's nice, but I have things working, and I'd like them to stay working. I'd really LIKE to upgrade, but I'm 110% sure that it's going to be nothing but misery.

Here's a reference regarding software RAID:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu...eta/+bug/68308

[mnp5]

To my friend the Belgian (cotcot):

Thanks so much for your helpful response!

To theosib:

It's raid 1 (raid 0 is asking for trouble -- substantially increases your risk of losing everything, as there's now two disks to fail and if one goes you're screwed).

Yeah, boot loaders are on both drives and all that good stuff.

I'm probably going to manually downgrade, even though that implies several hours of work. My suggestion: don't upgrade. This is NOT a stable release AT ALL; it's practically a frigging public beta. Busted web browser, general slowness, etc. etc.

[theosib]

I'm thinking someone should write an article that summarizes all of the problems that people are having with the upgrade. Just something generally informative, something that the developers can use as a reference, perhaps. Perhaps if they have something more organized, it'll help them fix the problems quicker.

[mnp5]

Fixed, partially.

In order for upstart to work you have to have "Inotify file change notification support" turned on in your kernel config.

Now I'm having ubuntu-related kernel compilation problems, whcih is another matter entirely.

[hahafaha]

I am running a Dell (Gasp!) C600 laptop. I upgraded to Edgy the day it came out. Here is what happened with me:

I was not running anything special -- default kernel, file system, etc. I did have a configured xorg.conf file, however. Upgrading took a while, the server I was using was swamped. Now, for those that don't know, the C600 series are known to occasionally overheat and crash, that is, a hardware crash, and the only way to get out of it is to press the power button and restart.

Now, because the server was swamped, upgrading took a long time and at some point, the hardware crashed. I had no choice but to reset it by hand. At this point, update-manager said that it can no longer proceed, since there were broken packages. I ran sudo aptitude dist-upgrade and it seemed to work. It said that I need to restart the system. I did.

The computer booted me into a strangely 2.14-ish GDM. I attempted to long into it, but it just displayed a blank screen. I restarted the computer again, and this time, it said that the X server crashed, because it was looking for /dev/wacom, and it was not there. Fortunately, I had a backup xorg.conf file, and after quite a bit of tweaking, I was able to manually fix it.

Before restarting GDM, however, I decided to run dist-upgrade again. Whoops, another good 500 packages to upgrade. I ended up running it again (several times), and finally got it to fully install.

The good news is that now I am running everything normally, and have no real complaints. I do not know if the reason the upgrade was troublesome was because of the crash or not, though.