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View Full Version : Issues with Xubuntu upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04



Randy_Bass
September 15th, 2016, 11:13 PM
I've been running Xubuntu 14.04 for a few years now, and did my first LTS upgrade to 16.04 (kernel 14.4.0-34), and would like to share the issues that came up in the upgrade. On the whole, it went smoother than expected, although many hours were required to get my system back to a "comfortable" state again. Here are the problems and what I did, if anything, to rectify them:




In grub2, error message that lvmetad is not running yet. Using direct activation during sysinit. Attempts to rectify using solutions found online don't work. Problems has since solved itself, perhaps with a recent kernel update to 14.4.0-36?
WIFI no longer worked. I use a third party module (driver) for my USB NIC (Realtek 8812au). I found out that it was rebuilt automatically and installed on the current kernel, as it was supposed to do, but was rebuilt with a previous kernel. I had to use dkms to remove the previous module from the kernel, and then rebuild and reinstall it with the current kernel, again with dkms. Then it happpened again with kernel update from 16.4.0-34 to 16.4.0-36. I made a script file to do this automatically the next time it happens, as it also happened on a previous update (kernel 3.13.0-78), for which my solution was to put the previous kernel 3.13.0-77 as my default in grub2. In researching this, I found people who were giving up on Ubuntu altogether because they couldn't get their WIFI working. It was an insidious problem.
Panel launchers for scripts no longer work. Rectify by pointing launchers to scripts with full directory on command line.
Keyboard mappings to scripts don't work. Rectify by pointing launchers to scripts with full directory on command line. However, some keyboard remappings don't stick on reboot.
Power Management screensaver doesn't work. Rectify by installing xscreensaver, set to desired time with blank screen.
Lost SSH “no-password” login to other computers on LAN. Rectify by recopying RSA file to target computer.
logname utility no longer returns the name of the login user, and in fact returns blank, which causes scripts relying on this utility to not run correctly. No workaround. $USER and $LOGNAME don't work the same way when using sudo. Alternative is to hard code the user's name into code. I have since learned that I can use $HOME and strip off "/home/" to get my login name, which will be the same even when I use sudo root.
Gparted was uninstalled. Rectified by reinstalling.
Font size changed in some menus.
In Settings>Window Manager>Focus, The Focus Model radio button “Click to Focus” is checked. However, focus will switch to another window when the mouse cursor is positioned over an out-of-focus window and the mouse scroll wheel is moved. Unable to rectify this change.
In Libreoffice Calc, some cells which reference text in other cells change case from sentence case to uppercase. This doesn't happen with all cells, just some. Unable to rectify. Very bizarre.
EDIT: Let me add one more thing. I have my desktop environment set up with 9 workspaces. I save a session with Thunderbird, File Manager, and Terminal to start up automatically on boot, with Thunderbird in Workspace 1, and File Manager and Terminal both in workspace 3. With the upgrade to 16.04, they no longer come up in my desired workspaces. File Manager and Terminal come up in workspace 1, and Thunderbird come up in workspace 2. I have deleted saved sessions and recreated sessions several times, and changed between "Only on this workspace" and "Always on visible workspace", but nothing seems to get this to work the way I want it to. This worked so well with 14.04.