Really Bad upgrade & installation experience

[geezer]

Laptop: upgraded from 14.10 to 15.04 with Muon. Thought the upgrade went okay until reboot. The panel (I have it at top) no longer had the icons for my favorite apps. Thought that was an upgrade glitch or maybe 15.04 didn't allow icons there anymore. Then I noticed that the screen flickered. The panel would disappear for less than a second and come back and then random lines across the screen would do the same. The screen would be okay for a minute or two more or less and then it would happen again. If I tried moving an icon to the panel like I used to be able to do, the panel would crash and the icon would disappear. So no icons on the panel. Would have to use the kick-starter to start all programs under 15.04. Wondered if that was a bug or if the developers had decided to do things that way. Stayed with for 2 or 3 days, no change. Panel would crash during random times even when I wasn't trying to drag icons to the panel. The screen flickering never went away.

Desktop: After the upgrade on the laptop, I wasn't too sure if I wanted to do the desktop also, but I had the 14.04 DVD and I had written a 15.04 DVD (past experience has taught me to ALWAYS write the DVD BEFORE trying an upgrade) So I tried the 14.10 to 15.04 upgrade with Muon. The upgrade went okay until the actual write to disk, i.e., the downloading finished. The installation progress bar got to 89% and just hung there. After about 30 minutes I knew it was hung and going nowhere. I remember that a previous installation from CD would do the same. Maybe this was a re-surface of the same bug So powered down, inserted the 15.04 DVD and booted into the installation. The installation finished and the machine re-booted. Well almost rebooted. After choosing the OS to boot I got a black screen that never went away. No Kubuntu.

So I downloaded Ubuntu 15.04 and wrote to DVD. Ran the disc and played with Ubuntu before installing and once again discovered the fundamental reasons I cannot stand Ubuntu - too much to go into here. But maybe Ubuntu would give me a working installation ?!?! Installed and found that Ubuntu did the same thing on booting on my desktop that Kubuntu did. So the problem (at least on my desktop) is common to both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. But that is no help to getting me a working machine.

So Ubuntu and Kubuntu 15.04 simple do not work on my desktop. Period. They will not boot - neither one.

The upgrade on the laptop runs - kinda, maybe. The panel crashes and is useless. It flickers off and then on. There are random flickering streaks across the screen. So Kubuntu 15.04 doesn't really work on the laptop either.

Don't really know if the desktop screen would have the same flickering issues as the laptop, couldn't get either Ubuntu or Kubuntu to boot.

So I have re-installed 14.04 on both the laptop and the desktop. Took a few days to remember and install most (all?) of the programs I have come to rely on.

This is beyond a doubt the worst upgrade/install experience I have ever had with Linux for any distro (Well Red Hat, Kubuntu, Ubuntu since those are the only ones I have really used extensively).

At this point I have decided to wait for 16.04 whenever that is supposed to happen. Hopefully by that time the developers will have isolated and fixed the problems. Maybe 15 was too big a step and the schedule was pushed too hard. Don't really know since I don't follow the development that closely.

The little experience I had with 15.04 on the laptop convinced me that I probably do not like the direction the developers are going. It looked like they have continued their push to take control away from the user and make more options disappear. One that really bugged me was the time format. I like 24 hour time format. The ability to use 24 hour time format seemed to have disappeared. The only way to set the time format that I could find was to pick a country and then suffer with whatever the developers had decided was the national time format for that country. Seems rather arrogant and short sighted to me. Heck I live in the USA and I personally know many people that use very different time and date formats. For time some like HH:MM:SS, others like hh:mm AM/PM others like hh:mm:ss AM/PM I know at least one that likes MM:HH (that one throws me every time I try to read the time off his screen ??)., but he has the choice to do it that way. I cannot image anyone arrogant enough to pick a National time format for the US. Date format for the US would be even harder. In my development there are so many different nationalities, we could host our own UN. Now how anyone could decide that they know better than anyone that all of those people should use the same date format and what that date format should is just nonsense. So all of those people should pick a country and hope that the developers have picked the date format for that country that the person likes Most were born in the USA and so don't even know the date format of their ancestors. I just don't understand the problem the developers have with letting the user dictate their own format.

Of course the problem could be that the upgrade on my laptop was so badly corrupted, that my experience in trying to set the time/date formats can not be trusted either.

I have been reading up on KVM and Qemu. Have installed on 14.04 and am thinking of experimenting with any upgrade in the future (possibly 16.04) before upgrading/installing. Would I get the same experience in a virtual machine as a native install??

[InsideJob]

The little details make all the difference. Because the new CPU resource gauge doesn't show individual cores, I had no idea two of them were pegged at 100% all the time. So whenever I need to monitor core temps I now have to do:

cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz
every few seconds like a chimpanzee.

I'm waiting for kernel 4.1 which should have the Intel video fixes I need, then will try 15.04 again. Shipping it with 3.19 makes it a bad choice for new hardware. I don't understand why Canonical keeps doing that.... 4.0 was available this time, so the "it wasn't ready in time" excuse doesn't fly.

[vinnywright]

The little details make all the difference. Because the new CPU resource gauge doesn't show individual cores, I had no idea two of them were pegged at 100% all the time. So whenever I need to monitor core temps I now have to do:

cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz
every few seconds like a chimpanzee.

I'm waiting for kernel 4.1 which should have the Intel video fixes I need, then will try 15.04 again. Shipping it with 3.19 makes it a bad choice for new hardware. I don't understand why Canonical keeps doing that.... 4.0 was available this time, so the "it wasn't ready in time" excuse doesn't fly.

you can if you like install the 4.1 kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ if you like .

and though I dont use the stock CPU monitor (whatever that is) ,,,,you could make your self a conky that only shows the activity of all your CPU cores .... of course you may want to show some process usage info as well to see what exactly is using up the CPU as well ,,,,,,,,,like "top"output.

and of course their is allso the Kickoff>applacations>system>Ksysguard that will show all this as well.

VINNY

[geezer]

I've been working the past few days on getting 15.04 working. On Sat. I bought an external USB hard drive, 1 TB. I'm old enough that it seems ridiculous to buy that much storage in a package almost the same size as a 3"x5" index card.

Anyway, after I had brought it home and plugged it into the desktop computer and played with it for a couple of hours, I got to thinking that with that much capacity, it would be shame to waste 99% of it. That got me to thinking that I really wanted to try and get 15.04 working.

So I booted kparted and repartioned the external drive and shrunk the ntfs partition to 100 GB - - I don't use Windows much. Just for taxes.

I then rebooted into the 15.04 DVD I wrote and installed 15.04 on the external hard drive and had GRUB2 written to the external hard drive. That gives me the option at boot time of booting into the new 15.04, the 14.04.2 installation or windows. I also had all of the internal drives and partitions on the desktop mounted.

The installation proceeded without a hitch and then I rebooted into the new 15. 15.04 hung right after I logged in. Well I don't think it really hung, but all I had was a black screen. But after about 30 minutes I pressed a key and the screen to unlock the screen popped in. Hmmm. repeated that 2 or 3 times and finally decided that 15.04 probably wasn't hung wasn't hung, just not displaying anything.

So I booted into 14.0.2, brought up kparted and tried to reformat the ext4 partition, but kparted just kept aborting on partition errors. So I rebooted into Windows 7, and tried the disk partition utility there. Deleted the ext4 partition and formatted as ntfs. Windows didn't complain. Rebooted into 14.04.2 and had kparted format the ntfs into ext4. Worked no problem . Rebooted and found out that the GRUB2 MBR was no longer valid. Unplugged the external hard drive and rebooted into 14.04.2, did some research and erased the MBR on the external drive. That solved that problem except with the external drive plugged in, the boot process went into never- never land. Slept on that and woke up with the solution. I remembered that kparted had displayed that the NTFS partition was flagged as bootable. Used kparted again and cleared the flag and booting worked like a charm.

So I worked with the new ext4 partition backing up a lot of stuff. Then I got the wonderful idea that I couldn't let 15.04 rest. So, I downloaded another copy of 15.04 and checked the message digest against that posted on the download page. They checked, so I wrote yet another DVD using the desktop instead of the laptop. Booted the new 15.04 DVD and again installed on the external drive. Rebooted and the boot went fine. Installed updates to 15.04. Then installed a lot of the s/w I use daily (still working through as I remember things).

So, I've been running 15.04 yesterday and today off the external USB drive and it has been stable. Plasma crashed once, cannot remember why. But otherwise it seems stable.

Booting takes longer since I am booting over that USB cable. Otherwise speed doesn't seem to be really slowed down that much - probably because I'm the slowest link in the chain.

I have noticed that if I have my android smartphone plugged in when I start the boot process, it seems to hang. Maybe because the phone is plugged into the USB port and GRUB is trying to boot from the smartphone When I unplug the smartphone, booting proceeds normally.

I like the option of booting from the external drive. It has many advantages:
1. about 1.6 TB of storage to expand into,
2. I have all of my folders and their contents on 14.04.2 available,
3. I have copied all of the stuff from 14.04.2 to 15.04 on the external drive - a simple matter of using Dolphin, copy and paste.
4. I used the above to get VPN up and running in a few minutes.
5. I also used it to get NFS running between the desktop and laptop in less time that I have ever gotten nfs working - copying working files is much easier than creating from scratch.
6. I can boot 14.04 or 15.04 my choice.
7. If I have to grab something in a hurry to evacuate, grabbing the external drive and stuffing it into my pocket is quick and easy and all I need elsewhere is another working computer with working USB and I have a working Kubuntu with all of my stuff on it.

There are probably a few more advantages, but the wife is calling, so have to go.

[InsideJob]

I turned EFI off ("legacy" in BIOS) and installed PC-BSD from a USB 3.0 stick onto an SSD hard disk... all my Kubuntu 15.04 problems are now solved. LOL

Maybe it's just me but Plasma 5 seems like a step back. If it was rock solid I could put up with the bad looks but... ugly and buggy doesn't work for me. The latest PC-BSD from a week ago (5/22) still uses Plasma 4.

[geezer]

15.04 continues to be an interesting experience - every time I boot it, I am wondering what new experience I am going to have that KDE gives me.

Booted again today after dinner. KDE came up with Dolphin and the terminal windows in desktop 1. They were in desktop 4 when I closed down.

No panel, so I didn't really know what desktop I had or really anything about the system.

Used Ctl-F(1/2/3/4) to cycle through the desktops. That's how I found out which desktop I had.

With no panel, I had very few options on what I could do. No task switcher or task launcher. I haven't really become a fan of keyboard shortcuts. So I couldn't really do anything useful.

Used the magic key sequence: alt-sysrec-RSEIUB

to reboot and it came up fine this time.

Always exciting to see what new experience KDE 15.04 has in store. I think I could use a little bit more boring though.

[geezer]

The experience continues. Turned everything on this morning and decided to continue my learning experience with 15.04. The Kubuntu boot screen with the funny little dots came on and after some minutes (How many ??) the system welcommed me to emergency mode and stated that I had three options for continuing. The first was an option for viewing the system logs. I scrolled through the first 500 or so and found them to be 99% meaningless to me. Then tried the reboot - couldn't do it. Went to Alt-Sysreq-RSEIUB and got the messages that the system was synched and used the power down button on the front of the computer. Powered back up and got a normal boot.

[geezer]

New computer, learned about clearing the ~/.kde and ~/.cache folders and rebooting. That fixed the crashing plasma.

Also, I learned that in my experience, /home directory MUST be formatted to clear out all the stuff holding over from previous versions.

I remember a few versions back that was standard practice for me (and a few others I read about). Never upgrade in place and never leave /home cluttered with stuff. Always install from DVD and always format /home.

That was true a few versions back and I got lulled into complacency. I have relearned the lesson.