Good day all I'll try keep it short, because this mail doesn't contain anything particularly constructive -- it's just pertinent here because of the sheer number of people who have posted that perhaps Karmic wasn't ready for the big time. Also, I don't know where else to put this up for general perusal where the people who count (Ubuntu devs) will actually see it. I could LJ it, but you'd have to be a sad puppy to be reading my LJ (<a href="http://fluffynuts.livejournal.com">http://fluffynuts.livejournal.com</a>). So here it goes: In approximately 10 years of Debian/Ubuntu usage (I switched to Ubuntu in the Warty days), I have *never* had the displeasure of such a broken upgrade process as I've just had, moving from 9.04 to 9.10. I've experienced such brokenness from Fedora (but hey, that *is* the testing-ground for RH, so you take your chances to start with, imo). Here's a short list of some glaringly obvious problems that even the most incompetant QA should have picked up (which, by the way, are being experienced by not only myself with the heaps of packages I have installed from the Ubuntu repos, but also by a colleague at work who started with a fairly standard 9.04 install just the other day.Please bear in mind that I have *very little* installed from anywhere other than <a href="http://archive.ubuntu.com">archive.ubuntu.com</a> -- I think I have 2 ppa's for tor and rvm. So my machine, whilst bloated with GNOME, KDE and XFCE components, is using mostly off-the-shelf components): 1) libc6 upgrade requires the restart of gdm. Which in turn requires the termination of the X11 server. Which, in turn, requires that the upgrade process proceeds in a never-ending loop as the actual installation of libc6 doesn't complete properly. Not a problem for a vet with some experience -- a big problem for the "average joe" that Ubuntu is normally so well-suited for. Whilst I can switch to a VT and use apt, I don't have the confidence that the average user out there could, although they would have been presented with the same "upgrade now?" question by update-manager 2) When I finally got the process started, there were several (read 10+) rounds of the following: apt-get dist-upgrade [apt breaks because of package dependencies or other issues, such as the config script for a package failing] apt-get install -f [lather, rinse, repeat] again, not that great for Joe user. Not that great for me either. But at least I can attempt to fix it and remove conflicting and horribly broken packages. I have several bug reports on Launchpad. I got tired of posting them all when I got to about the 10th one. Generally, the issues were often of the format: upgrade of package [Y] requires installation of new package [Y-funkyname], but old [Y] wasn't removed first, so the installation of [Y-funkyname] fails because of a package file conflict. Indi comes to mind here. OR bad installation scripts which cannot be run more than once (say, when the package fails to install the first time). Wicd shines here, trying to add my user to the net-dev group repeatedly and "failing" because I'm already in that group from the first time it partially installed. 3) The kicker: after spending a couple of hours on this, I managed to get my machine to a state where apt claimed that I had no more updates available. So I figured it was time for the inevitable reboot. Except... GRUB is broken. Can't boot. Showstopper. I've tried fixing with a 64-bit Debian DVD (sorry, I didn't have the 9.10 install CD down yet -- it was coming down for me to share with friends when all hell broke loose during my upgrade). When trying to fix from with a chrooted shell on the problematic system, grub-install consistently fails with an error that it has an error reading the stage1 file (which exists and I've seen it unpacked from a re-install of the package .deb using dpkg in a chrooted shell, so please, don't tell me that I personally have a problem with the file -- I would be surprised if this isn't happening a lot more (and may well be because of changes from the old GRUB to GRUB2 -- but again, a simple QA process *should* have caught this). To add insult to injury, for the very first time in my life, I'm using my dual-booted Windows install to provide a platform to attempt to fix my Linux install -- downloading the 9.10 iso in the hopes that *something* on there is way different from what is in the .debs that I've downloaded during my system upgrade. I'm loathe to re-install: it's just Not The Linux Way (tm). But it's starting to look like I might have to. This has to be the most disappointing upgrade I've ever experienced from Ubuntu. Truly, the people who were begging for a release delay of a week or so should have been given a little credence. And perhaps I have to learn not to trust that the Ubuntu upgrade process will work? Flame me if you will -- this release has not been good for the Ubuntu image. Still, I live in the hope that Things Will Get Fixed. And, where I can, I would dearly like to help -- if only I can boot my machine again sometime soon... -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- There is no shame in not knowing; the shame is in not finding out.