Giving up on Edgy

[NoOp]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 01:04 -0800, NoOp wrote:
[snip]

>> Edgy, for many, is an AOL coaster CD/download that can and *will*
>> destroy a perfectly good Dapper system and/or virgin system. 
> 
> I haven't seen any real evidence for this. Yes, there were some postings
> on the list, but without knowing how many upgrades worked fine, it is
> hard to say. I suspect many upgrades are also hosed because of Automatix
> and similar unoffical stuff, or people ignoring the instructions. I just
> can say that I upgraded one system and installed another and both went
> perfectly.

That might be a valid point (unofficial stuff), but wouldn't explain the
further problems with the fresh install.

>From my posts in the "Restore Dapper after Edgy" thread:

 > And after 8 hours, 47 minutes the upgrade crapped.
 > And screwed up the system. Can't even boot it now. BTW: that was a
 > system that only had a very basic Dapper installed (w/all updates).
 > That was interesting...
 > [Tried to restore after the "upgrade" using that CD, but never managed
 > to get all of the dependency and other errors to clean up.]
 >
 > - CPU fan now sounds like someone threw sand in it [1]
 > - PC wouldn't shut down without power button [2]
 > - failed to initialize HAL! error [3]
 >
 > [1] Could be coincidence - it's an old 300Mhz CPU but odd that it
 > happened immediately after the Edgy install.
 > [2] Fixed by enabling ACPI in BIOS and modifying Grub menu to include
 > acpi=force
 > [3] Fixed from mods found in a linux forum and eventually here:
 > https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/dbus/+bug/19577
 >
 > 6 hours later (from clean install) and the machine is finally starting
 > to settle down and look like it's workable.
 >
 > For my other machines I'll just stick to Dapper for awhile...

Following the "clean install" everything slowed down, and I would get
frequent freezes. I finally just ripped everything out and reinstalled
6.06. Since then all works just fine (6.06) -- CPU fan even works
properly again.

> 
>> Had my test
>> system not been fully backed up when I attempted my Dapper to Edgy
>> upgrade (and later full install) my system data would have been hosed.
> 
> Well ... upgrading without a full backup is foolhardy and everyone will
> tell you so. Out of interest, what was the problem?

See above & yes full backup generally is important. However in the case
of the test machine it only had a 4Gb drive, so: 1) there wasn't much to
backup, and 2) I ended up backing up to a different system. As an aside;
I found this link for the Debian upgrades to be informative/helpful for
future attempts:

http://www.debian.org/releases/etch/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

that provides some good information on what to backup:

====
The main things you'll want to back up are the contents of /etc,
/var/lib/dpkg and the output of dpkg --get-selections "*" (the quotes
are important).

The upgrade process in itself does not modify anything in the /home
directory. However, some applications (e.g. parts of the Mozilla suite,
and the GNOME and KDE desktop environments) are known to overwrite
existing user settings with new defaults when a new version of the
application is first started by a user. As a precaution, you may want to
make a backup of the hidden files and directories ("dotfiles") in users'
home directories. This backup may help to restore or recreate the old
settings. You may also want to inform users about this.
====
Much more good advise.

Many new Ubuntu "upgraders" may not know what to backup beforehand, so
it might be wise if Ubunutu took the same approach and provided similar
instructions.

> 
>> Bottom line is that Edgy is buggy and IMHO should have never been
>> released, nor should it be promoted as the primary Ubuntu distro.
> 
> "Not released" I don't think so, "promoted differently" I agree

On that we disagree. Not only did the upgrade (following the upgrade
instructions to the letter) trash the existing 6.06 system, the fresh
install via the Alternate CD required considerable work/patching just to
get it to work at all. Not to disparage the fine folks that worked (and
continue to work) on Edgy, but Ubuntu should have held off on releasing
this version for IMHO a considerably longer beta.

[large snip]

> 
> This is an argument against Edgy how??? Excuse if I didn't read the
> review myself, your quote seems pretty irrelevant to our discussion
> 
> Summary: you would have save me a lot of time if you actually read the
> links you posted instead of blindly copying and pasting. I am open to
> discuss and I do believe that Edgy is rough around the, um, edges, but
> let's increase the quality, will you?

Apologies for the copy/paste; however the quotes were directly from the
Ubuntu Weekly News #21. I did in fact read all of the links. Some links
indicate that all went well with the Edgy upgrade, far too many indicate
that that the upgrade had disastrous affects on others. There is a
survey regarding the upgrades at:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285446

 The upgrade went perfectly!  	266  	24.45%
I had a few problems. 		353 	32.44%
I encountered serious problems. (for example, can't connect to
Internet) 				213 	19.58%
Things went really badly and I can't [ log in, boot, etc ]! 							256
23.53%

A 43.11% rate of serious or "really badly" problems indicates to me that
Edgy should be withdrawn and sent back to beta. For the time being
(maybe a rather long time) I'll stick to 6.06.