[ubuntu-us-in] 11.10 upgrade FAIL

[Simón Ruiz]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 2:30 PM, justin sullivan
<j.p.sullivan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I was bored this afternoon and thought I would try and upgrade my notebook
> to 11.10 from 11.04. Every attempt that I have in the past to upgrade to the
> latest and greatest versions have failed me. I'm not sure why that is
> exactly but it SUCKS. I am going to have to start from scratch again...I
> think I'm just going to go to *BSD for good, kinda over the broken BS that
> is linux.....venting complete.

Right on.

> so basically the installer reached the last stage of installing the new
> software needed for 11.10, stopped, and gave a message saying that something
> had failed and your system is going to reboot into a possibly unusable
> system....yay for ubuntu!!!!

That was a little more venting. :-)

> anyone else have any similar problems with
> upgrading?

It's been my experience that the more things I change on a system, the
less likely an upgrade is to go smoothly, especially as I like to muck
around on the command-line and break things. I need to, sometimes, to
get proprietary hardware working for example. Or I want to, sometimes,
to get a different version of some software than what Ubuntu packages.
But those are the things that tend to cause issues when I upgrade.

I've noticed that on machines where I don't make many changes to the
system—especially on systems where I've done everything,
configuration-wise, through the GUI—and on machines where all the
hardware uses open drivers, upgrades have gone quickly and smoothly
for me.

I tend to prefer a clean re-install when we're talking about my
primary workstation. Something about the whole fresh install process
makes things feel clean and new; maybe it's just a habit from years of
keeping a Windows machine running. *shrug*

I actually was able to make the jump from 11.04 to 11.10 smoothly on
my primary system, a System76 desktop, when I tried on a lark; though
I usually opt for a fresh install. Of course, the hard drive then died
a sudden and irrecoverable death so I was forced to re-install from
scratch anyways... :-)

I've never lived in a rolling distro for very long, so I'm not sure
what's life's like on the other side of that fence.

Simón