Ubuntu Lucid upgrade – a catalogue of disaster and pain
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I recently upgraded 3 machines to Lucid. I don’t recommend it.
Broken after upgrade
2 out of 3 machines did not boot after upgrade to Lucid.
One, an upgrade from Hardy, crashed hard during the upgrade (the screen was frozen with a prompt about lmsensors visible). It’s possible this was caused by a hardware issue of some kind, but it’s behaved itself since. When I powered off the machine it failed to boot because grub couldn’t see my hard drive. I believe this was because the file system had been changed in some way (to ext4?) but grub hadn’t been upgraded because of the crash, so it couldn’t handle it.
Anyway, I spent a day trying to recover the system, and then a night rebuilding from scratch. I’m still configuring the system and regretting the upgrade.
The second, a netbook with a fairly standard Karmic install on it, upgraded smoothly and worked.
The third, my work machine, upgraded smoothly from Karmic, and frigged my fstab so my second drive wasn’t found. It changed my main drive to be identified by a UUID (instead of being /dev/sda), and this meant my second drive, which used to be /dev/sdb was now called /dev/sda. The upgrade failed to correct this in my fstab and gave me a very rude error during boot.
Fortunately I had the technical knowledge and found the time to fix these things, but it’s hardly something I’d like someone like my parents to have to deal with.
Annoying after upgrade
- My volume applet disappeared. Bug 552221
- Empathy doesn’t tell me about messages any more. When I enable the stupid indicator applet, I get a tiny yellow star when a new message has arrived. I can’t get an Empathy applet to appear in the status area.
- Thunderbird 3 thrashed my disk and network for a couple of days to download and index all my IMAP mail. It is faster now, though.
- I can’t get Thunderbird to give me a “Calendar” link in the bottom left to switch to the Lightning plugin. I did find the “LightningButton” add-on that allows me to have a button on the toolbar. Yes, you are reading that correctly.
I loved Karmic. It got me all excited about Ubuntu again. I wish I’d stuck with it.
Wish I’d read this before, instead of later. My Karmic laptop upgrade went fine. But my desktop from Hardy to Lucid… enough dpkg dependency errors that the system crashed hard. Unless I find some shortcut, it’ll have to be rebuilt. It’s still ext3 and grub is intact and the old images, but it apparently changed enough that it’s a mess. They supplied no clue on how to approach fixing this. The abort requested I report a but against upgrade-manager, but launchpad doesn’t have that package. And this one’s my work machine for app development, so it’s pretty loaded.
Looks like smash and burn’s the only way, so I’m downloading lucid to a flash drive. At least the drives can still be mounted:-)
Hi Gerry, good luck with the recovery. I wonder whether some kind of dependency problem caused my crash. By the time I got back to it it was just frozen solid.
Thanks to a post by Will McGugan, I fixed the problems I was having with the flash plugin failing and losing sound: http://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/2010/5/2/no-audio-in-flash-on-ubuntu-1004/
(Summary: rm ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so)