Ubuntu 10.04 triumphs over GRUB bug Canonical has overcome a late-breaking bug in Lucid Lynx to deliver the next installment of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu 10.04 was released to the web mid morning Pacific time on Thursday, the day originally scheduled. Final code can now be downloaded for Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, Server and Netbook editions. The release came after …
I am mainly a Windows user but am trying to learn more about Linux/Ubuntu. I upgraded to 10.04 LTS and now the Windows boot choice in Grub, while still available (and still last on the choices menu) no longer works. I go to a blank screen with an underscore cursor that stays there... forever.... Help, how can I boot directly to Windows and bypass Grub, or can I?
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This post has been deleted by its author
It's almost certain that bugs were found in Windows 7 just hours after release. They are discovered all the time. It's just that Microsoft aren't as good about telling the community about them as Ubuntu.
It's spurious logic to say that because the bugs weren't announced they didn't exist.
"It was decided a respin was preferable to having users try to implement their own work-around."
That's ALWAYS preferable, you freaks.
Why should millions of users have to spend tens of millions of man-hours putting band-aids on bugs on their own when you could f ix it yourselves in a few man-hours and pass the fix down to all of us??
And why is there no Tux icon with devil horns??
"pass the fix down to all of us": That's exactly what they did do. What is your point? That they went through the process of weighing up two options?
Yeah - that's really evil. Despicable. Why are these people still walking free?
Or alternatively you could read the article, you freak. The "workround" was to install, apply updates (no doubt prompted, as usual, by the update manager) and reboot - a minute or two of assisted and painless action for the vast majority. They weren't ever planning to leave people to work it out for themselves.
I've been running Ubuntu for 4 years now and I can't remember an update when I actually needed to reboot.
Wait, scratch that -- when I upgrade from one entire release to the next, I reboot.
For just about anything else... if it's a daemon, it gets restarted. If it's an important library, daemons linked against it get restarted. If it's the kernel -- well, I read the kernel update logs, I rarely see anything that makes me want to reboot immediately. Sure, there are a couple of useful fixes that I'll enable some day by rebooting.
I've found the Debian apt/dpkg installation & packaging system to be amazingly reliable, leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've used.
Certainly in this case about being able to boot your other OS, there's no point in rebooting Ubuntu! Just keep using it until, in the natural course of things, it's time for you to boot the other OS. (Ok, there is one reason: to confirm that the update actually fixed the problem. Which is entirely _your_ choice. No forced reboot. You'll find out naturally without having to boot prematurely.)
I'd say my reboots are about evenly distributed between: reboot to absorb a new OS release; I screwed something up; power failed for long enough to drain laptop or UPS batteries; or some sort of crash. Yeah, it does crash maybe a couple times a year.
I contrast that with the monthly reboot shoved down your throat if you're running some sort of Windows. Yecchhh.
You are so right. This is one of the coolest things about Linux, you can upgrade anything except the kernel without a reboot (and kernel updates are few and far between and never urgent).
I actually upgraded my whole OS from 9.10 to 10.04 whilst still using the computer! One reboot later and voila.
Try that with Windows. You're looking at hours of downtime. In fact you can't to upgrade XP to Win 7 without having to re-install all your apps afterwards. I quote from Microsoft's XP to Win 7 "upgrade" page :
"You’ll need to reinstall your programs by hand after installing Windows 7. "
I lost nothing with my Ubuntu upgrade.
"4 years?! In less than one year with Ubuntu 9.10 my notebook has required countless post-update restarts."
No, you had "countless" updates where it _said_ you should reboot. You didn't have to unless there were kernel changes you urgently wanted to activate.
With Windows Update (XP at least) you _cannot_ continue normally after an update. Windows Update will not run again until you reboot: you can't install further updates or check your update status.
The reboot advisory on Ubuntu is just an advisory. If you ignore it, you can still do further updates and the system works normally -- you just lack the kernel portion of the update. Since the kernel updates usually have nothing relevant to me, I see no reason to disrupt my system.
Do you wind yourself up in this tortuous, pedantic wind bagging with every little thing that passes your way? The long winter evenings must just fly by.
"Ok, there is one reason: to confirm that the update actually fixed the problem."
That's the one most people just clicked into their understanding in about a nanosecond.
Next time you decide whether it's to be beans or eggs for tea tonight, please do post a detailed run down of the A->B thought processes that get you there. Fascinating.
AC wrote "Why should millions of users have to spend tens of millions of man-hours putting band-aids on bugs on their own when you could f ix it yourselves in a few man-hours and pass the fix down to all of us??"
Because the bug only effects dual-booting systems, which means that anyone who isn't sharing their system with Windows/MacOS won't see it. And last time I installed Windows on a box with Ubuntu on it I am very sure that the only boot option on offer post-install was Windows only. :p
Personally I think Ubuntu played this one totally correctly - they found a problem, so held back the release while they fixed it, and "fessed up" to why there was the delay. Certainly nothing to warrant demonising the folks concerned.
As far as I know, the options discussed were:
1) Delay release until migration-assistant is unborked. Maybe make it 10.0.5
2) Remove migration-assistant on shipping CD. Perhaps add in for 10.04.1 or something.
3) Ship broken CD, get something (anything) into the repos that'll force an update-grub to run on first upgrade. Hope everyone does this on first boot.
I don't think anyone (in any position to sway Canonical's decision) seriously suggested making all users run update-grub themselves.
Too late mateys,
I've pissed about with Ubuntu for a number of years and it has never been stable yet !
Going to penguin tastic forums to sort out problems, is to be insulted by penguin heads because you use Windows.
This is not the way to support users.
What a load of Bull Shit and hog wash this OS is.
I have lost complete installations just doing security updates.
Dual booting Ubuntu has always let me down, eventually the Boot Loader goes missing !
And unless you are a penguin, reinstalling the OS from scratch is all you have left ?
Or the f*cking forums ?
Ubuntu certainly isn't ready for desktop use as a working business system.
IMHO, It's still a developers testing ground.
I think I'll stay with OpenSuse, it hasn't crashed once in 8 weeks since install, which is more than I can say for any Ubuntu release since 5.04.
AYOR
ALF
You're a Windows troll. Or to use a Brownism - an ignorant bigot.
From my experience (and given it's popularity, it's one shared by many) Ubuntu IS stable and usable for business. Heck, I'm a software developer and my main system is a 64bit Ubuntu that I use for development natively and also as a host for a number of VMware VM's. It was installed two years ago and has crashed on me less than half a dozen times - and the majority of those were early on in the life cycle. Okay, that doesn't sound that good on the face of it, until you realise that I use that system day-in, day-out and it's also used for some desktop type work - watching DVD's etc. I push it hard, and it copes admirably.
My worst Ubuntu experience has been with my little netbook - good in itself, but then a disk crash hosed the OS. Funnily enough a couple of fsck's in the failsafe session got enough of it back to be usable, and certainly good enough for me to be able to get my data and configs off of.
I'm not going to stoop to your level, I don't like OpenSuse that much, but I'd still say it's a good distro - horses for courses, As to Ubuntu, maybe "the fault lies therein yourself"?
I've used, since about 1999, Redhat (Including Fedora and CentOS since the split), Debian, Slackware, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu.
In those 11 years, I've had one system which I kept having to reboot - which was a known issue with the NIC drivers. For most people, this wouldn't have been visible - it happened roughly every 10 days, which was often enough to irritate me but wouldn't have been noticed by 99% of users.
That was a "flavour" agnostic issue - with very specific triggers. Other than that, I've not had stability issues on any version of linux - usage is much more important than distribution.
I use ubuntu because it's a good compromise (for me) between the stability of Debian, and the "bleeding edge" of Fedora. My experience of the forums is that the users are a lot more friendly to people "testing the water" than the other forums as well.
As the title says, your mileage may vary - if you have a version that "just works" because the release cycle happened to match your hardware nicely, you're going to be happier with that going forward.
Where does one go for Windows support?
I've spent a while looking. Forum, mailing list or IRC channel, any (or ideally all) would be good, but there don't seem to be any that match what I can find for Linuxes, let alone beat them by the margin you infer the Windows ones do.
I've pissed about with Ubuntu for years, and it's been nothing but stable.
Updates haven't caused me more than a couple of problems, and the fixes for those were on the forum before I needed them.
As I've said before, and will say again about Linux:
It doesn't suck any more than Windows does!
(and quite a bit less, from my experience :-)
I've been quite surprised that several articles talk about the X server problem and this Grub problem as if it's somehow strange or amazing. This stuff goes on all the time in development release cycles. Maybe the QA in Ubuntu is lacking and these issues didn't crop up until quite late in the day, but it's hardly "news" that Ubuntu has a bug in Xserver or in Grub, it's just part of the cycle. Do you put out a headline for every issue submitted to their bug tracker? No, so why mention these two specifically.
Seems like another nice bit of polish from the Ubuntu team but while they continue to bastardise standards and encourage application developers to roll their own UIs rather than work with a standard system (the whole desktop notifications debacle), they wont get my vote.
... is the bug whereby installing it for dual-boot on a system that previously only had Windows causes grub to get the Windows partition number wrong, meaning you can't boot Windows until you edit the GRUB config file manually.
This has been the case for years and you wouldn't think it would be too hard to sort...
..boot another OS? This isnt Sony PS3 you know... ;-)
anyway, after you've installed Ubuntu, WHY would you want to boot another OS ? 8-)
and as another wag pointed out in the replies...Microsoft doesnt care a damned about any other OS on the system and will just blat the bootloader with its own crud...and not put 3rd party options into place for you....they've never got around to fixing that issue.
Last night, I updated my dual-boot Vista (yes, I know) / Ubuntu PC to 10.04. And Vista disappeared from the GRUB offerings. So I've just done the Unbuntu updates and rebooted (as suggested) and Vista is still not on offer. So it's an error to mark this issue as being totally solved.
Other tidbits led me to try booting the offered 'Windows Recovery' boot option, and it turns out that it's actually Vista (Hello World!). So I've found Vista, but the GRUB is all screwed up. And I guess that means that the actual Windows Recovery option is actually missing. That makes two errors...
Given the circumstances, I think I'll just let it 'cheese ripen' for a few days...
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