Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC Canonical says it is working to fix a problem that's crippling some Ubuntu PCs after they've been upgraded to the latest version of the Linux distro. A spokesperson for the company told The Reg it is aware of a "small number" of "power users" are seeing their PCs crash following the move to 14.04. Until there's a fix, the …
FWIW I did clean Mint install last month - new hard drive - and it was ridiculously painless.
It took all of fifteen minutes, including remembering how to disable Caps Lock, plus fifteen more to install the two or three non-default apps that I use.
I shudder to think about how much I used to dread the regular Windows re-installs back in the day.
"...Upgrading anything may knacker anything but don't worry your pretty little head, Gavin - we don't expect you to know that..."
With ZFS and Solaris you are immune to this problem. You just take a snapshot of the filesystem before upgrading, and if the system is unstable you just reboot again, into the earlier state and delete the last unstable snapshot. It is a killer feature, as you can take a snapshot on a live system, and upgrade it and test it. And then you just reboot and in GRUB choose which snapshot you want to boot into.
"Un... why didnt you just reinstall the bootloader..?"
Just in case; google "Ubuntu reinstall bootloader using a live CD"
Takes minutes rather than an hour or so for re-install and restore backups. Another trick is the separate /home and / partitions so just the OS can be re-installed using the 'custom partitioning' without copying back hundreds of Gb of 'stuff'.
Do you really reinstall everything when you bork your Linux system with an upgrade? That is really primitive! Why dont you use ZFS-On-Linux instead? At least on Solaris you can snapshot a live system before an upgrade, and if the upgrade fails you just reboot into the earlier state, and delete the snapshot. You choose which snapshot you want to boot into via GRUB. Really neat. Has saved me many hours of work several times, when I have done something stupid in Solaris. I just take a snapshot (takes a second) and then I am free to do anything such as deleting the kernel, etc.
"I have never met a 'power' user that runs Windows."
They mostly do in the enterprise. All the traders here with 6-8 HD screens each on a single PC and each running dozens of trading applications, market data feeds, broker screens and Excel sheets, etc. etc. all run Windows 7. We do get the odd few that want a UNIX shell or to compile stuff so we just install Services for UNIX - which lets them run and compile what they like and offers a choice of shells - but without all the security and management issues of a native Linux OS...
"All the traders here with 6-8 HD screens each on a single PC and each running dozens of trading applications, market data feeds, broker screens and Excel sheets, etc. etc. all run Windows 7. We do get the odd few that want a UNIX shell or to compile stuff so we just install Services for UNIX - which lets them run and compile what they like and offers a choice of shells - but without all the security and management issues of a native Linux OS..."
And what runs the servers that the clients connect to?
I'm genuinely interested, not trolling...
"And what runs the servers that the clients connect to? I'm genuinely interested, not trolling..."
Can't say exactly without knowing what the person was doing / who they were working for. A lot of these systems are running on Windows Server, but the London Stock Exchange itself has moved from that to Novell Linux following a nasty crash that happened back in (I think 2008).
That's a software crash, btw. Not the usual wipe-out-your-pensions-give-money-to-the-banks-quick financial crash that happens every few years.
>>"Surely you'd use a Windows 7 boot CD to re-install the OS if you're a power user? No?"
Or better, just run it in a VM. Either GNU/Linux on Windows (7+ obviously) or Windows on GNU/Linux. Either way, dual-booting is so 2007. ;)
Plus if you have two monitors like me, you have the best of both worlds at the same time!
No major problems with the upgrade here to Xubuntu 14.04. The only glitch I ran into was a problem where Xfce didn't want to let me change my wallpaper. I'm not sure exactly what I did to fix it, but I think I mostly just logged off and back on the session and it magically went back to normal.
"I upgraded, which is always a tense and nerve racking experience anyway as you never know what is going to go wrong."
@Connor
Life is too short for being tense and nerve-wracked by a computer!
I use recycled laptops, one for serious work and one for playing around with. No guarantees so I practice 'defensive backup' as follows...
1) Do the full jwz backup thing (google 'jwz backup'). Find out about rsync and the command line options you need to use for NTFS external hard drives. Test out the various rsync command line options.
2) Once a full backup of all your files has completed, test the readability of both backup drives on another computer before proceeding. Save the command lines you used in a text file for future use. Google 'bash history' and the bash 'Ctrl-r' command search functions.
3) Download Clonezilla and make a bootable USB stick and have another external HD dedicated to clones of your hard drive. Just use the simple settings and image whole drive of the computer you want to upgrade. There are guides available by Googling
4) Nuke target computer hard drive. Restore the clonezilla image as a test. If all works well...
Then, either
5a) Do the upgrade with the warm feeling inside that you can go back to the known working Clonezilla image
OR
5b) Nuke again and clean install new system with same user name and password. Then restore home drives, perhaps having renamed the dot files depending on changes in the UI. (I have a separate backup of just the dotfiles).
dotfiles: watch out for email programs that store email in .mail or something. If using Firefox, export bookmarks as html file now and again. If using Evolution, export an archive now and again. Watch out for version changes with Evolution!
The best thing to do with any new Linux release is to run it in a VM first (e.g. VirtualBox) and have a good play with it to make sure it behaves itself. Then you should wait a month or so for updates to fix the initial release problems (because the wider audience will discover stuff not found in testing) and if you're still worried, set up a dual boot between the old and new Linux versions so you have an easy way to go back if something insurmountable still crops up.
Sadly, I'm finding neither Fedora nor Ubuntu particularly attractive at the moment, so I have now-unused VMs with them in and stick with my trusty CentOS 6.5 as the bare metal OS (along with a dual boot to Windows for games of course).
The best thing to do with any new Linux release is to run it in a VM first (e.g. VirtualBox) and have a good play with it to make sure it behaves itself.
Except that it probably wouldn't have helped here. If userland components work in a VM that's a pretty good confidence test but for anything dealing with the hardware - the kernel, drivers and indeed boot loader - it's pretty much a stab in the dark. Differences between emulated and physical hardware are always potential issues. It sounds like something like that is happening here since it's only affecting a subset of users and not everyone, suggesting it is some hardware quirk at issue.
A similar thing happened to me a couple of months ago upgrading a server from NetBSD 6.0 to 6.1. Fire up a VM - yes, the bare OS works. Rebuild the applications and test those.. check. Apply current production configuration to the VM and make sure nothing breaks... check. Install on the physical hardware and make sure it boots - no problem. Re-install applications and user data - again no problems. Load on some archived data from DVD+R - fine. Drop in a DVD-RAM... oops.
VMs just don't show problems like that.
Me too, grub complained about fonts and dropped me into a nonfunctional recovery prompt.
I happen to have a boot repair disk from
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
around, it was able to repair grub automatically so I didn't have to do anything except click apply and reboot.
Its very handy.
It's been a few years since I made a clean install and every time I made an upgrade I had to reinstall the bootloader. Can't remember when it started. Never found anything on the forums. But I'm getting a new hard disk, and with news of this bug, a clean install of 14.04 is looking more and more attractive.
I always have an Ubuntu bootable USB pen with Grub-rescue installed on it. I have a proper weirdy bootloader with about seven OSs on it, and it often gets eaten when I start playing with EFI shizzle - so it's a handy thing to have in a drawer somewhere.
Detects your filesystems, rewrites GRUB, Bobs your uncle, Fanny's your aunt, and gertrude is your second cousin twice removed that you need to be careful about getting drunk around because that sort of thing isn't really approved of these days.
Steven R
Never ending. Every version of any flavor of Linux screws itself up when trying to fiddle with Grub entries.
Ubuntu is by far the worst, leaving all sorts of crud around after updates, 17 kernels spewed on my hard disk, and of course safe modes for each of them. You can bet it break any Windows boot loader entries too, just to be safe. And you can also bet that the mess that FakeRAID is will confuse the hell out if it.
It just worked (tm)
Count your blessings, then. Upgrading the 8.04 LTS Mythbuntu to the 10.04 LTS resulted in failure to boot - the grub boot list somehow got "updated" disk IDs that obviously found no disk to boot. Then the upgrade from that to the 12.04 LTS... you guessed it - failed to boot, because apparently something "suddenly" didn't have the right permissions anymore.
Ultimately I fix this sort of thing (with the appropriate amount of disgust, to be sure) but I sure do wonder how the heck the Average Joe - towards who Ubuntu is marketed - is supposed to deal with failure to boot after an upgrade. I mean I'm sure it's no big deal at Boeing either if one leaves a screwdriver in a jet engine or something...
"Was happily using Ubuntu 11.04. Decided to upgrade to 11.10 which promptly went berserk as it couldn't handle the integrated graphics on my old Shuttle box."
Actually, a lot of video drivers were completely wrecked in 11.10 that worked in 11.04; in 12.04 most of these worked again.
I used to run every new Ubuntu version, starting with 8.04 or so. But, 10.10 just broke stuff compared to 10.04; 11.04 came together pretty well; 11.10 was quite broken again, and the real "fix" for it was to upgrade to 12.04. Given this, with 12.10, and 13.xx, I tested them strictly in VMs. I'll go right from 12.04 to 14.04 on my real hardware (which apparently does avoid the specific grub problem here, since it's manifested on 13.10->14.04 upgrades.)
Yep, only way to fly, unlike my, wife especially when it comes to iOS upgrades, she is front and centre for upgrades, when hers starts working properly I upgrade mine, I never seem to have a problem :-)
Not sure how many power users run out to upgrade immediately on their production box either and that's any OS or distro not just Ubuntu, simple rules
1 upgrade for Linux Kernel, wait one week
2. upgrade for Linux Distro any flavour wait 2-4 weeks
3. upgrade for OSX wait 2-4 weeks
4. upgrade for windows available depending on version number wait 2-3 months or 2 - 3 years :-)
" the upgrade breaks the GRUB bootloader, rendering the machine unbootable."
I had that problem multiple times with Ubuntu, maybe even with the last install ... instead of reading my GRUB and keeping the information it writes a default GRUB file. And, because my disk drive assignments aren't bog standard, It can't find the boot information.
I reported it several times and got zero response from them.
What a clever idea to unify the search so you have one box to find files and applications, because once you're using it, they have you by the balls to insert any kind of junk advertising they want into the results. And that's exactly what they've done.
Used to be an ubuntu fan but there's nothing cool about an OS that shows adverts.
Since adverts are on by default and you need to use the menu to change the settings, looking at at least one advert will always be mandatory in Ubuntu. Ok you probably know some super keyboard shortcut to change the settings, but I would rather memorize more important things than that so there.
The only thing really stopping Ubuntu from taking over has been very poor QC of the last 3 versions and a joke of an installer and updater.
Fix that and make it dirt simple for non-techies to install, and world domination will happen.
Oh, and as for the recommended fixes? NONE of them worked. The final fix was to boot to a Win DVD, get a command prompt and run bootrec/fixmbr.
Took me 3 hours to find the fix and 10 minutes to actually fix it.
"The only thing really stopping Ubuntu from taking over has been very poor QC of the last 3 versions and a joke of an installer and updater."
And providing as wide a testing coverage on real hardware as possible, is what The Community should really be doing. Without that QC teams have fewer issues to work with. I recollect various pleas for more ISO testing, and specifically upgrade testing on various Ubuntu outlets a few years ago when 12.04 was coming in. I did do some ISO tests on 12.04 with shonky Intel integrated graphics on an old AMD box I had.
Could we perhaps be seeing here the effect of a shift of the hobbyists and tinkerers to other Linux distributions? The kind of people who will spend a Sunday morning tracking down an obscure issue on a particular combination of hardware with a specific distribution rather than just tossing it and installing another?
Debian Stable and the Enterprise Linuxen (RHEL, CentOS, Springdale Linux and Oracle Linux) are generally regarded as more stable and better tested than Ubuntu, but that may simply be a reflection of the much longer testing periods. Packages tend to be older on Debian Stable and the ELs. Swings, roundabouts.
Most things breaking are (relatively) trivial to fix. If Grub goes tits-up, it's a serious problem.
Funnily enough, Grub updates are the reason I gave up Ubuntu and moved to Debian. Four or five routine Grub updates threw up messages that they'd failed and my computer may be un-bootable.
I can restore my system from backups easily for almost any problem, but if the Grub bootloader's bust, I'm in the shit!
I just filed a bug report for it this weekend. Seems pretty silly that they forgot to include the dm-raid modules in the initrd and thus renders the rebuild of my media center unbootable since I decided out of the blue to convert the box to RAID5 (and convert it to Linux from Win7, but that's because of my lately-increased hatred for M$). It's a pretty silly mistake since the modules are needed for the machine to boot. I did manage to fix it tho.
Bugreport: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1313169
Ironically, I have two other RAIDed Ubuntu boxes and they upgraded and boot fine, albeit they're fitted with RAID0 instead, since they're built primarily for my gaming needs.
I also have a problem with the NetworkManager applet not showing on all three boxes- may file a bug report later, once I figure out how to fix that- the internet searches seems to suggest that there's an error in the dbus config somewhere.
My Dell Studio 1535 seems to have problems waking up from sleep on 14.04. The screen stays blanked and I would assume it is off in la la land if it were not that the lighting in the keyboard comes on for a few moments. And they still did not fix the reversed power save mode when you go on and off battery power. Everything is fine while you are on battery - then you plug-in and it dims the screen like you went on battery. You can at least use the brightness keys to bring it back up. Reported that one last year.
Linus Torvalds has said that Linux does not have a design, and will never have. Instead, big parts are rewritten all the time, so we iterate to a better version. Just like nature evolved humans from apes. This "rewrite and throw everything all the time" is superior to a stable design - according to Linus.
This leads to big parts of the code being in beta stage all the time. The code never has time to mature, so it is unstable all the time. Just read all the threads here on problems when upgrading. Linux is very fragile, upgrade it and chances are big it won't work. But hey, people said that Windows is the best system for years. So there will be people saying that Linux is the best system.
Linux is the new Windows, fragile and sloppy code. Another big problem is that the internal Linux ABIs are frequently changed so you need to modify your device drivers, and recompile them. New kernel releases might trigger recompilations and modifications. Depending on which kernel you use, you need to use the corresponding device version. That is one of the reason this article was written. Big OEM vendors have large problems updating all device drivers every time the Linux ABIs are changed. They need to employ developers doing this. Say HP has 1.000 drivers, and they have 10 developers doing nothing but this. Then they have to fix 1000 drivers each. How long will it take to modify and recompile 1000 drivers for a single programmer? Say he does 10 drivers a day, it will take 100 days. But before that, Linus Torvalds has chagned the ABIs again.
No other OS has this broken device driver model as Linux has. Within a windows version, your drivers will work. Within XP, your driver will work no matter you run XP SP1, SP2 or SP3. With Win8, your drivers will work no matter you run 8.1 or 8 SP1 or SP2, etc. Only Linux has this broken model. And that is the reason you get problems when you upgrade Linux. And this article could be written.
I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 on the day after it was released. So far I have had no problems and 14.04 is both faster and less buggy that 12.04. I have had many problems in the past with Ubuntu messing up using the upgrade option, so I jiust nuke the hard drive and do a fresh install and I have had fewer problems. I have been using Ubuntu since it was in the 5's
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I suppose I shall burn an Alternate DVD and restore grub on the Linux partition, redo the multiboot stuff after if needed.
Snazzy mass market distro should not do such things. With dual boot in mbr and not with grup but with windows, none of the easier ways of addressing this type of thing apply. Takes too much fussing rebooting each time to verify which of Linux, grub, windows mbr bootloader, or that bootloader's multi-boot bcd entries or the config snippet from the Linux partition is a fault; to fix the offending component; and to verify everything works, not just the same or a different selection of some things.
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