8.10 Bricked My Machine

[johnelle]

6 months ago I moved to Ubuntu after getting disgusted with the quality issues of Fedora (I used it from RH V2 through 8 or 9).

Now I did my first upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 using the standard upgrade mechanism and my machine is a brick. Just sitting there displaying the wait cursor. Hours of reconfiguration ahead.

Are any of the distros upgradable? Fedora never worked so I always kept it to standard configurations. No critical data. I thought Ubuntu was different so I had a lot of packages configured (no data thank God).

Has anybody ever seen a Linux distro actually upgrade successfully?

[gila_monster]

Yes, many times. Just about all of mine, actually. Had some trouble with early versions of SuSE, and had one Ubuntu upgrade that completed successfully, but had a couple of problems, so I did a reinstall.

Had similar issues with Windows.

A lot depends on your hardware, any tweaks that may have been made, and a lot of other factors.

[Dies]

Yup, Ubuntu has yet to let me down on an upgrade. I have to admit I've been waiting for it to, but it hasn't...

I've also upgraded Fedora installs from one to the next, though Fedora can get messy.

[Rebelli0us]

8.04 to 8.10 was a bust, I had to reinstall.


Sorry, not 8.10, the previous version, 8.01 or whatever

[cariboo]

You probably have seen this before, but when you upgrade from one version to the next, make sure you're fully updeted, then remove any non-default repositories. after doing the above, you should have a successful upgrade.

Jim

[johnelle]

You probably have seen this before, but when you upgrade from one version to the next, make sure you're fully updeted, then remove any non-default repositories. after doing the above, you should have a successful upgrade.

Jim

Well in this case I think the problem is more serious. I wiped the disk and tried to run the 8.10 install and it hangs the install just bringing up the GUI (see the outline but only the watch cursor gets painted). This is a very generic AMD machine that has run many a Linux. The only odd thing is that it has that VIA "Chrome" graphics chip for a display. I could have tried a non-GUI install but decided to go back to good old 8.04 and stay there for a good long time!

[bousozoku]

I've done upgrades since initially installing Ubuntu 7.04 and though they all worked, they've become progressively worse with 8.10 being completely awful.

I got a CD-ROM since I didn't want to depend on my internet connection to download everything, but after I finished, the package manager told me I needed 690 MB in updates anyway. It's not bricked but it's flaky, either.

I wonder what Canonical were thinking. It seems to me that they need to slow their updates from 6 months to 9, if they can't do it properly.

[jimv]

Not all is lost. Boot from the CD, backup your home folder, install 8.10, then restore your home folder.

My "upgrade" method is that I have 3 partitions. 1 for my main installation, 1 for swap, and 1 for testing out new installations. So when a new release comes out, I install it to the test partition. Then I copy over my home folder and tweak everything until it seems stable, then that partition becomes my main installation. When the next release comes out, I repeat the process with the former main install partition as the new test partition.

[johnelle]

Not all is lost. Boot from the CD, backup your home folder, install 8.10, then restore your home folder.

My "upgrade" method is that I have 3 partitions. 1 for my main installation, 1 for swap, and 1 for testing out new installations. So when a new release comes out, I install it to the test partition. Then I copy over my home folder and tweak everything until it seems stable, then that partition becomes my main installation. When the next release comes out, I repeat the process with the former main install partition as the new test partition.

Well I understand but imagine having to do that with Windooz. Since the press often touts ubuntu as a Vista replacement it seems that things are moving in the wrong direction.