Share with us your Trusty (14.04) Upgrade & Installation Experiences

[tbzep]

Saved all my stuff for fresh install, but decided to try upgrade first. It killed my grub. After a few minutes of digging for my grub repair disk, I got it going. Seems ok so far. One thing I noticed is that Firefox and Thunderbird open with the top of the windows tucked underneath the taskbar. I have to drag them down each time in order to get to the menu buttons. All other program windows open exactly where they belong.

[WogBoy]

I just installed Kubuntu 14.04 on a Hp Pavilion G6, AMD A4-3305M With Radeon HD Graphics 1.90 Ghz 4GbRam. I did all the updates during install, It all seems to work fine. Everything seems way faster watch me break it.

Thanks great job.
Wog

[BigSilly]

Hey!

Install of 64 bit edition of Ubuntu 14.04 onto a Samsung NP355VC with 6Gb RAM but a dual core AMD processor. Install went flawlessly and setup similarly so with minimal tweaking regarding function keys. Only real issue thus far has been installation of Google Earth which isn't working. Followed numerous guides but nowt works.

Otherwise massively impressed with new Ubuntu and am considering it for my own desktop PC which is running Mint at the mo.

[TheFu]

So, I have upgraded 1 machine with "desktop", performed a number of fresh "desktop" installs under VirtualBox, installed "server" cleanly that is working as expected into 2 KVM VMs, and attempted to install "server" on to a Core i5 Laptop, which failed completely.

* Acer C720 chromebook - After finding the kernel module building script to address the patched touchpad drivers, it works ok - though about 20 things must be manually corrected post-install. This was an upgrade from 13.10 where all the drivers were previously working. Oh ... and the wifi isn't working now. Haven't had enough time to troubleshoot. I generally use wired GigE connections.
* VirtualBox installs were less about Ubuntu and more about the best performance from the combined vbox+14.04 setup. Documented in a thread somewhere in these forums (I intended to create a blog post with consolidated information, but lost it). In short, fully preallocated the storage for spinning vHDDs to get 90% native performance, enable 3D accel GPU support for about 2% more if running Unity. Using sparse vHDDs will be 10-50% slower. Older vbox settings article. which still applies.
* KVM virtual machines sorta "just work" - though these were just "server" installs, not desktop. x64.
* Install of "server" on a Dell laptop with a Core i5, 6G of RAM and plenty of storage failed completely during installation. When it finished asking all the language question is where it froze. I reported this in U+1 forums. I think the installer was confused by having multiple network connections, but don't really know.

Generally, I load "server" on my systems, then only if necessary, add a GUI. Most systems here don't get a GUI. Unity will never be loaded on these systems ... now that my initial testing is done. fvwm or LXDE are enough.

[meduzapat]

I found "the error" the settings I was using are not compatible with the new ones, actually the new ones are easier

[BigSilly]

Spoke too soon. Terrific experience on the laptop, dreadful experience on my desktop.

I can't install it. The installer just freezes midway through. It locks up the desktop, locks up the mouse, then the whole lot is inaccessible, and cannot be exited without hard reboot. I've tried three times now, and though the freeze occurs at different points during install, it will still happen. It even happened once right at the end!

So sadly for me, another Ubuntu release I cannot use.

[WogBoy]

Spoke too soon. Terrific experience on the laptop, dreadful experience on my desktop.

I can't install it. The installer just freezes midway through. It locks up the desktop, locks up the mouse, then the whole lot is inaccessible, and cannot be exited without hard reboot. I've tried three times now, and though the freeze occurs at different points during install, it will still happen. It even happened once right at the end!

So sadly for me, another Ubuntu release I cannot use.

Ok let me ask a noob question.

Your PC hasnt got UFEI or Secureboot rubbish?

[bapoumba]

Please remember this thread is for feedback, not support, thanks.

[BigSilly]

Ok let me ask a noob question.

Your PC hasnt got UFEI or Secureboot rubbish?

No, nothing like that. It's an older motherboard (Biostar MCP6P+).

Please remember this thread is for feedback, not support, thanks.

Yes of course no problem. I wasn't looking for help.

Have now installed Kubuntu 14.04 on this desktop just fine. No hangs or crashes, all good so far.

EDIT: After spending some time configuring and setting up Kubuntu 14.04, I can confirm an excellent release.

[mgmiller]

So far I've tried it in 2 places (3 sort of)
1) Zotac Z box with atom cpu and 2 GB ram (shared with Nvidia ion graphics leaving 1.5 GB free)
This had 12.04 originally, upgraded to 12.10, then to 13.04 and finally to 13.10 32 bit running on the original HDD which I then upgraded to 14.04. This was a very slow but flawless upgrade. The HDD was a pull your hair out slow drive. 14.04 was noticeably faster than the old 13.10 install, but I had really had it with the HDD. Also, suspend, resume never worked pre-14.04.

2) Same Zotac with a new SSD installed and then did a clean install of 14.04 32 bit. This was a flawless install and the little 'box' is now quite usable. Impressive performance from the nouveau drivers, but on HD video streams, it was hitting all 4 cores (2 cores with hyperthreading looks like 4 cores) with about 90% cpu with an occasional dropped frame. Installed the nvidia driver with vdpau support and cpu use dropped to 20-30% with butter smooth video. Also, suspend resume works fine and there are no problems with the Lenovo BT keyboard/trackpad. Perfect out of the box. They could sell this machine with 14.04 pre installed and people would be very happy with it.

3) My work laptop which is a 2009 Lenovo T400 with dual core intel with 6GB ram intel HD graphics and SSD. It originally had 2 GB ram and a spinning HDD. It has had various versions of Ubuntu (starting with 9.10) running on it for the last few years, 12.04 up until now. It has (since 11.04) had a problem with resuming from suspend. The system would wake up and allow me to work for about a minute and then freeze up for about 1-2 minutes with no keyboard or trackpad input working. It would then smooth out and work fine till the next time I suspended it. I did a clean install of 12.04 64 bit after adding 4 GB more ram to bring the total to 6GB trying to resolve this, but it just got worse. I then did a clean install of 14.04 64 bit. What a difference! 1st, it was a flawless install. But best of all, all the freezing is gone and the OS is so fast and responsive it feels like a new, much faster computer. This is the fastest I have ever seen this laptop.

The only thing I noticed is if you want to install the Ubuntu restricted extra packages, you should not do it through software center. It freezes on installing the msft corefonts because there is no display of the license box for you to check off the "accept terms" thing. My work around is to use software center to install synaptic package manager and then install the ubuntu restricted extras using synaptic. This works properly with no errors. Since I have been using Ubuntu since version 4.10 (Warty), I kind of like synaptic anyway.

I have 2 more desktops at home and 2 at work that are all on 64 bit 12.04 that I am looking forward to upgrading soon.