Last night I upgraded my home PC from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10.  On the one hand, the upgrade went better than any other upgrade ever has.  On the other, I ran into some major problems.

Good

  • The actual upgrade process completed without errors.
  • The computer was successfully upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 without any manual intervention on my part.
  • Desktop effects (aka compiz) are very fun.  I’d tried them in the past with less than stellar results (too buggy) but they seem much more stable now.
  • The extra buttons on my trackball finally work righ with Firefox under Ubuntu (back/forward).

Bad

  • The upgrader removed and did not reinstall the restricted kernel modules.
    • For my less technical readers, basically the upgrade broke both my wireless connection and 3D acceleration.  I could live without the 3D, but this computer relies on wireless to connect to my home network.  Fixing that took a couple of hours of digging around in the log files and using another computer to get the files I needed.  Major headache.
    • I understand why the modules were removed and not installed after the upgrade, but I wish the upgrader had been smart enough to realize I needed them and would have at least downloaded them to be available after I rebooted to complete the install.
  • KDE 4.x is the new default desktop environment for Kubuntu.  KDE 4.x does not play nicely with Nvidia graphics cards.  Like the one in my computer.  Meaning the lag between clicking on a the K menu and the menu popping up was about 2 minutes.  *ugh*  I could disable the Nvidia drivers to get normal performance back but then I’d lose my 3D acceleration.  *sigh*  So I’ve switched over to using Gnome, which will probably make at least one person I know very smug.
  • The network shared drives I had setup to be automatically mounted on every boot are no longer mounting.  Gnome has an easy way to connect to those shares, but I really don’t want to have to mount them manually every time.

Update: For those of you stopping by looking for instructions on how to do this upgrade, you can fine the complete instructions (with screenshots!) over at Ubuntu’s Community Documentation page for IntrepidUpgrades/Kubuntu.

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3 thoughts on “Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10”

  1. Ha! I half expected that “one person” link to go to me. 😉

    I’m the solo Gnome user at Linux Journal. All those silly KDE users… Also, I am always frustrated with upgrades. Even upgrading from 8.10 RC to 8.10 final was frustrating in that it wouldn’t give me the accelerated ATI graphics driver. Grr.

    Anyway, hope your system is working well. 🙂

  2. I would *never* revel in your misfortune. Much. KDE user. And 8.10 has caused me my fair share of headaches … the PVR front-end hooked up to the LCD TV did not like _at all_ the xorg.conf-less X11. Going with HAL detection is a good idea, but it still needs some work. I actually regressed it to 8.04, since it doesn’t really require the latest-and-greatest.
    On that same system I’ve required network shares on startup, and I’ve resorted to adding the CIFS shares to /etc/fstab. Not as user friendly, but a bit closer to the iron, and more portable.

  3. @Shawn: KDE3.x rules. KDE4.x looks cool and since you’ve got an ATI video card it might be usable (it’s definitely pretty). You should try it out like the rest of your LJ brethren. I might have linked to you, but I didn’t remember you as a Gnome fanatic. As for the upgrades, this was acutally the best Ubuntu upgrade experience I’ve ever had. All previous upgrades died in one fashion or another forcing me to resort to the cli just to complete and took much, much longer than this did.

    @Dan: Glad to hear that…. I think. Hmm, I’ve got entries in fstab already (using SMB vs CIFS) but they don’t automount. I have to do a sudo mount -a everytime to get them to mount. I’ve tried setting them up as CIFS before but that wouldn’t mount at all, wonder if my samba setup on the server box is horked somehow… Oh and I hear you on the regression idea but I do have things working now on the desktop so I’ll be leaving it on 8.10. However I don’t think I’ll be upgrading the work laptop from 8.04 to 8.10 just yet. I’ll probably wait for another LTS release for the laptop (since that’s the work machine).

    Side note: The upgrade fixed 2 other quibbles I’ve had for a while now:

    • About half the time prior to this upgrade that I told the computer to shutdown, it wouldn’t. Instead it would freeze up at the point where it says the system will now halt.
    • The LED for the NumLock got “reversed”. That is when the NumLock light was on, the numberpad was working as arrow keys and when off it worked as a numberpad.

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