Installation report: Ubuntu desktop 20080723 amd64

[Matt Zimmerman]

MD5: 698b51c0076b6113e21e0bd0a8ea061d

I've been running 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop on my ThinkPad T61, and decided to
take advantage of the pre-Alpha-3 test candidates to upgrade it to 64-bit.
I decided the most expedient way to do this would be to reinstall over it,
preserving /home.  I took a backup of /etc, /var and /home before
proceeding.

The installation experience was pretty hairy.  I encountered a lot of
problems, and have ended up with a fairly messy system.  I don't recommend
trying it.

Notes and issues:

 * I didn't see usplash during boot (no bug filed)

 * hotkey-setup tried to invoke discover, which was not installed
   https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hotkey-setup/+bug/251116

 * The time zone widget in Ubiquity, after I clicked on London, unexpectedly
   scrolled down and to the right and then zoomed out

 * After selecting my keyboard layout (step 3), ubiquity ran depmod.  This
   takes a very long time when running from the CD, and seems unnecessary.
   https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/251117

 * The new guided resize widget looks very nice, I hadn't seen this before

 * The dialog which is presented when you try to reuse an existing partition
   is a bit confusing.  It didn't seem to speak to my use case
   (reinstallation).  I can't seem to find it in the source right now, but
   think it could do with some tweaking.

 * iwl4965 wireless firmware is missing entirely:
   https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-restricted-modules/+bug/251123

 * I noticed some dbus assertion errors via HAL in the live environment,
   which unfortunately I don't have a copy of (you'll see why later).  The
   error message stated that this was normally indicative of a bug in a
   program using dbus.

 * Ubiquity crashed in clock-setup because the netcfg/dhcp_ntp_servers
   template was missing.  I commented out the relevant code to work around
   this.
   https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/251140

 * Apport was not triggered for the Ubiquity crash, so no crash report was
   generated and I had to file the bug report manually, later, with
   incomplete info.  It's disabled in /etc/default/apport, but I thought
   Ubiquity was an exception to this.
 
 * I noticed that the panel shows the old logout icon, and the old logout
   dialog when it is clicked.  I'm not sure where this lives or whether it's
   already known.
 
 * In running through Ubiquity the second time, I noticed that while my full
   name and hostname were saved from the previous run, my username wasn't.
 
 * Just before the installation completed, the entire system froze.  It was
   in the middle of removing packages, and the last thing I saw in the long
   (which I was watching at the time) was dpkg output, strangely all in
   caps:
   ... (READING DATABASE...
   ... 273427498732 FILES AND DIRECTORIES CURRENTLY INSTALLED.)
   ... REMOVING GPARTED...

   etc.  The log showed the postrm of gparted (I think) failing due to a
   segmentation fault, and a few lines later, it froze.  Presumably this is
   a kernel issue, but I have no information to offer in a bug report yet.
   I will try to reproduce it with the new crash dump facility.
 
 * The system I was left with still had a fake start-stop-daemon, and failed to
   boot because udevd wasn't started.  Once I fixed that (from initramfs), I
   was able to login to GNOME.

 * I noticed that the theme was wrong.  It was neither the old orange theme
   nor the new gray one.  I opened System->Preferences->Appearance, and was
   told "This theme will not look as intended because the required GTK+
   theme 'Human' is not installed".  Presumably this is because I still had
   my old theme preferences because my home directory was preserved.
   However, shouldn't we continue to ship Human along with NewHuman so that
   people who prefer the old look can switch back?

My ISO test report is filed at
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/result/1796/8

-- 
 - mdz