Share with us your Bionic Beaver (18.04) Upgrade and Installation Experiences

[Marc St Louis]

Installation and operation went quite well on an HP 6560b. It disrupted the operation of W10 a bit that's installed on a second HD but that is no great loss.

[chris-1024]

What to say after my first ever Ubuntu installation today?

THE OK OR BETTER STUFF:

18.04 Desktop ISO Rufus-ed to USB-chip and booted perfectly.

Used Terminal in Trial to setup an aligned single partition on a new 500 GB SSD. Shame I couldn't find any comment anywhere on t'web suggesting that your installer auto-aligns.
If it does: spread the word,
If it doesn't ...get on with it (its only a dozen lines in Terminal for goodness sake!).

Installed 18.04 from Trial via "Something else" option onto the manual partition.
Leaving the "Something else" page (the one with select partition, file system, mount point) got some sort of error that fixed itself after a GoBack/Continue (with no edits by me), and the rest of the install was quick & easy.

The new installation worked almost fine from first boot.

THE ALMOST FINE STUFF:

Battery meter dead. Been on mains power all day and ALWAYS shows:
Energy 0.0 Wh
Energy when full 48.6 Wh
Rate 0.0 W
Time to full 0 seconds
Time to empty 0 seconds
Capacity 100%
Maybe my battery mysteriously died, but my finger is currently pointing at Ubuntu.

PC WiFi on/off button dead does nothing (I've seen a maybe-fix on t'web so will try that tomorrow)

Unexpected (by me, at least) behaviour in LO-Writer:
if I type in Writer:
sudo parted /dev/sda
both / disappear auto-magically!?!?
Only way I found to get the text I want is to start with:
sudo parted //dev//sda
and backspace away one / from each pair ...makes it tough to write documentation accurately!

OVERALL:

Despite some hiccups that I hope might be temporary, 18.04 turned out to be easy to get running (pace auto-align partitions). If my machine was truly a "Desktop" my experience would have been perfect since I wouldn't care about battery meter or WiFi button.
Bravo, seriously BRAVO!

MY CONFIG:

2 * HP 9470m (ex Win7-Pro on Micron 250GB SSD)
i7-3687U 2-core 4-thread 2.1GHz, 8GB RAM, Crucial MX500 500GB SSD
Ubuntu only (not dual-booting) on a single ext4 aligned partition of a touch less than 500GB
Intended use machine 1: fun (3 * Mac-Air do the work, 2 * Win do utility stuff).
Intended use machine 2: user's only machine ...it really really needs to work.
16GB DDR3L-1600 upgrades for both machines sitting on my desk (waiting for BIOS upgrades).

Wooooooo. Just finished drafting this in Text Editor and the the screen decided to rotate 90° anti-clockwise. Priority #1 tomorrow is to find a way to kill that.

Keep coding, Chris

[linuxyogi]

I installed Lubuntu 18.04. The installation went fine but I failed to update the system. See my thread.
Finally I got fed up and installed OpenSUSE.

[ispx]

hello all! this is my 1st post on any ubuntu forum ever so pardon me if there are any errors. beaver is my 3rd ubuntu the earlier 2 being tahr & xerus.

i used a dvd for installation, rufus does a fine job if you need ubuntu on a flash drive.

ubuntu has the best installation experience when it comes to the gui. whether you are a beginner or a guru the ubuntu installation process has always been smooth as butter.

what has me blown away this time is the minimal installation thingy. ubuntu is the only os to my knowledge with the option of installing the full package or the minimal package during installation.

i used the original 18.04 iso & then upgraded to 18.04.1, the upgrade process was effortless. 340mb of updates was downloaded & then i manually installed all that i need.

i thank mr shuttleworth & canonical for creating this awesome computer experience called ubuntu. the minimal installation thingy is a huge usp that ubuntu has over any other os.

[him610]

Upgraded a couple of ten year old laptops and Acer One Netbook shortly after 18.04 was released last spring with fresh installs of Xubuntu. My primary machine was upgraded with fresh installation of Xubuntu 18.04.1 last month. No issues, no problems encountered. It was necessary to reinstall drivers for printers and scanners; but I expected that.

[MSGone]

I bought a CD to install Ubuntu 18.04. Just about everything was automatic. I wanted something easy to install and use - and that's what I got. Everything seems to have gotten much better over the last few years with Ubuntu. I had a couple of Windows Bible study programs that I really wanted to use. I found some easy instructions, and they both work flawlessly on Ubuntu. Linux is supposed to be hard to use - but I found the opposite to be true. Everything worked right the first time.

[edguns]

I installed fresh ubuntu 18.04 LTS about two weeks ago on my old laptop HP Compaq 510 (Core 2 duo 2GB, intel graphics) and my PC
In my PC the installation was smooth and no issue until now, love it.

but for my old laptop, I must put cross at acpi=off and nomodeset options to started the installation or it just stuck at the beginning.
Was it the correct way to installed ubuntu 18.04 or my laptop is just to old to handle ubuntu 18.04 ? because my system has not been shutting down properly until today, it always stuck at error massage "Reboot: System Halted" and must press power button manually.
I am still trying to find solution for this, hopefully I can get one in this forum.

[edwardsah3-3]

I'm having continuing difficulties with gnome-flashback. I have done two fresh installs of 18.04, and successfully installed gnome-flash-back. By successfully, I mean that after the login screen, where I specified gnome-flashback, the correct interface appears. However, after a few logins, when I try to use flashback, I get what seems to be a version of gnome-3, but with a major bug -- When the screen locks, it's impossible to enter my password, the screen flickers "authentication error." I have to reboot. I am now using the vanilla ubuntu desktop, but I really don't want it. I want flashback. I'm running on a desktop machine (8 integer core, 4 floating point core AMD CPU). I have gone so far as to install a new SSD for the system. Any help would be appreciated.

Art Edwards

[Tadaen_Sylvermane]

I just completed my upgrade on my main HTPC / server for my home. I did not find the process straight forward and found that a new person could be thrown off by it quite a bit. Simple thing, but confusing as hell.

I did my initial upgrade to make sure it was fully current, then ran the do-release-upgrade tool. It ran for a half an hour or so then said success and told me to reboot. I rebooted and it said it was 18.04. However it also said it had some 600+ packages needing to be upgraded. Logical thing, sudo apt full-upgrade. Again waited for some more download and apt to do it's thing. Felt like I had to upgrade twice. Followed with an apt --purge autoremove to clean it out. All packages were finally completely upgraded.

I use 3 external repositories. Kodi, snapraid, insync google drive client. I had to manually change the .list files to make them work as add-apt-repository just spit errors at me. Manually edited those files, did my apt update and did another full-upgrade to bring those packages up to date.

I had a couple packages not configure correctly during the upgrade. LXD being the main issue. One of my containers was running with a raw.lxc config flag, ended up just eliminating that container then apt remove and apt install lxd to sort that issue out. I forget the name of the other package but it was solved the same, remove and install to complte the configuration.

I upgraded myself to netplan. Zero difficulty. Followed a simple guide I found with google, was practically foolproof. Cleared out the junk in /etc/network/interfaces and I was in business.

Total time spent on the upgrade, not including testing before pulling the trigger... Maybe an hour and a half. The process was a bit confusing, as mentioned I had to upgrade twice instead of once. Regardless it seems to be working flawlessly now. My HTPC functions are up and running smoothly, my LTSP pxe boot machines are up and running. All of my network shares and services in their individual lxd containers are functioning perfectly.

I've done my cleanup tasks, and cleared out all 16.04 remnants from my pxe installer server as well as old configs that didn't get purged due to them being custom additions. I'm pleased, albeit still confused about the double upgrade situation.

Happy with result, I am fully upgraded in my home now to Bionic.

[RichTheCoder]

I performed the upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04. It failed. It also said that it was restoring the 16.04 system to the way it was. But in fact, it damaged the configuration so that Software Updater and apt no longer work for certain packages.
I spent many hours trying things in the support forums, unsuccessfully, before abandoning the upgrade.
I have spent many hours trying things in the support forums to fix the damage, so far, unsuccessfully.
If you ask me whether the upgrade is safe to try, I would say that it is not.
I am glad that I made a clone of the main system partition before I began, and glad that my /home is in a different partition.