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

[PaulW2U]

On the day that the Artful Aardvark release went EOL (End of Life) I found myself with two installations of Xubuntu 17.10 on old or inferior laptops that I keep as spare machines and as a destination for backups of personal files. One laptop had been previously upgraded from Xubuntu 17.04. An attempt to upgrade from Xubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 on a third laptop had failed some months earlier but I was much more optimistic today due to a jump of just one release rather than four.

I set the upgrade process running and what must have been nearly two hours later successfully rebooted into Xubuntu 18.04 on both laptops. synaptic showed me that there were a couple of packages that could be removed on the machine that had been most heavily used. It was my main system for a while and many applications had been installed and removed over the past couple of years. All I needed to do to complete the upgrade was to restore some of the panel indicators that were removed due to changes in Xubuntu 18.04 and re-enable a couple of PPAs that were had been disabled.

So, much quicker than a full reinstall and customisation of two laptops and all of my settings and applications are intact.

Laptops are a Samsung R720 (new in 2009) and a Toshiba C-50B (new in 2014).

[frankvw]

Because I'm an oldfashioned "if it ain't broke don't fix it" type, I have been running 12.04 until about two months ago my old laptop suddenly departed for that great junk heap in the sky. Because 18.04 was just out I decided i might as well go for the freshest version, in spite of the fact that it was still warm from the oven.

On 12.04 I hated Unity, which is why I installed the Gnome desktop on it, and that worked fine. I used Truecrypt for encryption, storing the key files in cryptfs, because that simply worked out easier for me at the time. Resume and suspend worked, hibernation didn't.

So 18.04 was hauntingly familiar! I hate the Gnome 3 user experience (give me a menu, systray, task bar and workplace switcher any day!!) so I resorted to gnome-flashback which essentially means reverting to Gnome 2. It took a bit of doing but I got there. Because ecryptfs and fscrypt are currently very broken, home file system encryption was simply removed from 18.04 (the bigger the problem, the bigger the hammer, I suppose) so I resorted to my already familiar use of Veracrypt (the successor of Truecrypt and similar in all respects but with heavier encryption). Suspend-and-resume still works, hibernation still doesn't.

But gnome-flashback (i.e. Gnome 2) has serious stability problems on 18.04 to the point where I was forced to consider going back to the native Gnome 3 user experience. I tried that for a day or so, but I found that I am forced to side with Linus himself on this: it is bloody awful. Fortunately I discovered the Frippery gnome extensions which provide a menu (albeit one that can be somewhat difficult to maintain), a systray that actually lives on that part of the screen where I want it, a task bar and workplace switcher. But then, the Frippery extensions are, according to the author, intended "for grumpy old stick-in-the-muds" of which I am obviously one, so I'm happy.

Initially there were a lot of difficulties. LibreOffice would crash regularly and nuke its profiles in the process; the root file system would be remounted read-only after a resume for no apparent reason, and some processed would hog one of the CPU cores at 100% all the time while being idle. Now, a few handfuls of updates later, most of these appear to be sorted out or in the process of being sorted out. Inevitable teething problems, I suppose.

There are still quite a few irritating problems to solve, though. The Skype indicator will not show up in the system tray no matter what i do, but Knotes shows up twice! My sound device disappears every now and then to be replaced with a dummy device until I do a "pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload". Resume from suspend works most of the time but every now and then leads to a crash. And hibernation still won't work (while the bundled Windows that came with my laptops had no problems with it whatsoever, neither XP and Vista on my old laptop, nor W10 on the new one) which is embarrassing!

I'm hoping that the remaining issues will be solved soon. Suggestions welcome!

// FvW

[fuzzbox2]

Hi,

Count me in the "Install worked but had a few things to fix" group.
Fresh install on a new HP 15bw074nf laptop, from a 18.04 usb key.

Not the best choice for a dual boot computer (hardcoded windows priority at boot time, no ssd drive, crappy integrated wireless/bluetooth chipset...).
At first, an unexperimented user may think that the installation failed, because on startup the machine keeps on booting Windows with no warning, regardless of the bios configuration.
I have to press F9 at boot time to open the boot menu and from there access to grub and boot Ubuntu. Anyway, HP problem.

A weird message on startup : [Firmware Bug]: cpu 0, invalid threshold interrupt offset 1 for bank 4, block 0, and several ACPI warnings, but it boots.
I had to install a 4.17.11 kernel to make bluetooth work, and manually install the rtl8723de wireless module driver. Usual Linux pleasure.

I was very disappointed by the default boot time.

After postponing apt-daily.timer, disabling Networkd-wait.online, re-configuring journal-flush.service and switching from GDM to Lightdm (I use i3wm), boot time went from 2mn10s to 1mn07s !!
By default, this is not the best possible user experience.

Cheers

[jcastaneda2]

Update from 16.04 was good. It did take a few hours and had a minor hiccup. It was fixed about a day later when I ran an update and restarted.

[ubontik2]

Previous version was much better.
how to disable a keyring?
I did not have problems with loading Skype before. But now it does not start at the computer start. Every time I start the Skype I need to enter login information.

[RichTheCoder]

Hardware requirements: I read a recommendation that a processor newer than eight years is needed for Ubuntu 18.04 . 16.04 runs fine on my 12-year-old Core2 Duo processor. Do I need to fear an upgrade?? Dell Optiplex 755 with 8GB RAM.

[hazel123]

Just installed Xubuntu Bionic Beaver to Eee PC 904Ha - brilliant. It's dual booted with Windows 10. Windows 10 is very slow on it. Xubuntu was very fast to install and works perfectly. My favourite was 12.04 but this works well. Decided to try it on the other Eee PC we have (which nothing will run on except Windows 7 as it's cedartrail) and it works! Spread the news! It is the only Linux distro I have found that works on this cedartrail Pc with the correct screen resolution. Haven't fully tested it yet though.

[rainintheface]

I have used Ubuntu off and on for many years, but had migrated away from it in recent years. Recently, I spent a few months distro hopping around and found a few that I liked for awhile, but I frequently returned to Ubuntu due to its versatility, available support, and available software. Other distros often have one or the other thing that is better, but I think Ubuntu has the best overall experience for me. However, I have recently had some problems installing on a dual-drive system that required work with Gparted, partition tables, and boot repair. I was able to read a lot about this on various websites, blogs, and forums (a huge advantage of Ubuntu) and found that simply disconnecting one of the drives and selecting to erase and install on the single remaining drive solved all of these issues. I then just reconnected the other drive and use it as a storage location with no programs or OS on it. Solved a lot of little annoying issues. I like Gnome mostly, thought I wish out of the box it allowed a few more tweaks to the desktop, date and time, etc. I personally love the vertical launcher to the left, the apps button in the lower left, and the positions of the time, etc. in the top bar. This layout works well for me.

[faraonlatino]

First of all, I want to send my high props to the developers. I am truly amazed by the quality of the new Ubuntu 18.04.1. I got into Ubuntu with 18.04, and I installed a few libraries in Python, but I was not careful to use virtual environments, so I ended up making a big mess of all Python module dependencies, hence I had to re-install Ubuntu again from scratch (this was all my own fault). After re-installation and being extremely careful to use virtual environments, my system has been working flawlessly. I just recently switched to use Ubuntu after a lifetime of using Windows. I am finding the experience really awesome, and I finally feel like my computer belongs to me. The gnome desktop is just awesome! The shortcuts to change work-spaces so flawlessly feel like a lot of power at my fingertips to substantially increase productivity. All in all, I just wanted to thank the developers for this awesome OS!

[diegogdvu]

Intel Cherry trail z8300
4GB RAM
32eMMC

Installed, sound didn't work, i solved that via a kernel upgrade aside from that my only problem is that my Wifi is SUPER slow like 5% - 10 % tops of my normal intenet speed and i dont know how to fix it, tried everything.