Karmic (Beta) Test Installs

[NoOp]

As mentioned in the "Grub 2 in Jaunty/Karmic can break double boot
configuration" thread, I decided to try a few different test installs of
Karmic Beta. I figured that it's better to start a new thread (blog?)
regarding the tests.

Test machine: 1Ghz/384Mb, hd0,0 (sdb1) = jaunty (fully updated) - 10G
drive, hd1,0 (sda1) = hardy (fully updated) - 20G drive.

1. First test involved _upgrading_ the jaunty drive (10G) to karmic beta
using:

To upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type
in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update
Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '9.10' is
available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

went well, albeit slow:

 26 packages are going to be removed. 268 new packages are going to be
installed. 949 packages are going to be upgraded.
  You have to download a total of 659M. This download will take about 1
hour 40 minutes with your connection.

Overall took about 3 hours. grub 1 (0.97-29ubuntu56) is still installed,
but grub-common is now grub 2 (1.97~beta3-1ubuntu7). So, menu.lst is
still available & the drive is still ext3. Other OS (Ubuntu hardy 8.04)
on the second drive still boots without issues.

2. Second test involves installing karmic beta via the liveCD on hd0,0
(sdb1) over the top of the karmic beta installed in test #1.

- filled in all the bits regarding timezone etc., & at the partition
screen the liveCD defaults to sdb (hardy). I selected the option to
instead install over sda (karmic) using the entire drive. CD whirs &
does it's thing for awhile & eventually I get a 'Low Disk Space' popup
stating "This computer has only 0 bytes disk space remaining". Huh? Well
my options are: Examine or Ignore. The first time through (I'm on my
second attempt) I selected 'Examine' and that proved worthless as baobab
(Disk Usage Analyzer) crashed. So, this time I select 'Ignore'. That
drops me to the liveCD desktop... nothing follows. Have to hard reboot
the machine as there is no disk space left to even adjust the display
(karmic thinks my display looks great at 1280x960 so you can't see the
top panel).

One would think that the liveCD would have followed the method in
jaunty's liveCD and gone ahead and formated & re-partitioned hd0,0
(sda). I gave up.

3. Third test involves using the karmic beta Alternate CD (something
that I am quite familiar with from all my other Ubuntu distros).

o life is good again (almost).

- I get to select which of my 2 ethernet nics I want to use for the
primary network interface, although DHCP doesn't seem to work (it does,
I control & configure my router just fine), but the alt cd allows me to
config the network manually, which I prefer anyway.

- I can manually select & partition sda (hd0,0 karmic beta from #1),
select ext4 (I did for this test case), ext3, etc., etc. I elected to
use Guided partitioning & use the entire drive.

- when finished partitioning, I get a '[!] Configuring grub-pc' window
telling me that other operating systems have been detected (Ubuntu
8.04.3 LTS in this case) & advising that if all have been detected,
"then it should be safe to install the boot loader to the master boot
record of your first hard drive. When your computer boots, you will be
able to chost to load one of these operating systems or your new system.
Install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record?"
I selected the default 'Yes'.

o Installation finished without issues/errors. Reboots. Grub comes up &
shows the karmic install, but (as with the previous clean install - see
the previous "[Karmic] Heads up" thread from 9/23/2009) it doesn't show
the sdb (hd1,0) hardy drive/install at all.

Note: I still get the  'address space collision on of device
[0xfc9c0000-0xfc9dffff]' on the system
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/424142),

I continue to boot & login... the showing of usernames at the gdm login
screen still bothers me. The screen is set for the silly 1280x960 so I
have to add the Menu to the bottom panel so that I can change the
setting to 1024x768/70hz... I doubt that new users will know how to do
that btw.

I can see the other hardy drive in Places|20 GB Filesystem, but of
course can't boot into it until I modify Grub 2 as pointed out in the
"Grub 2 in Jaunty/Karmic can break double boot configuration"
and
"[Karmic] Heads up"
threads. So, gentle karmic testers, a read through those threads are
worth the effort :-)

I'll try some more scenarios tomorrow if I have a chance, but for the
time being:

1. Updgrade from jaunty via the network = +1 (works without issues).
2. Install from liveCD = -1 (wouldn't recommend it)
3. Install from Alternate CD = +.75 (works with some grub 2 issues).