My 5.10 -> 6.06 story

[tonihele]

Today I upgraded my Breezy to Dapper, it took more than 4 hours, and the internet connection is 100Mbit!

I updated Breezy, checked that package "kubuntu-desktop" was installed and finally I cleaned up the sources.list & replaced "breezy" with "dapper". This far so good but this is of course just following instructions. I went to the "console mode" and tried to update. I realized that it wanted to remove "kubuntu-desktop" along with some other packages. 120 new, 850 upgraded, 160 removed. Well I went ahead with the update, hoping that I could simply restore it.

The download and installation took about 15min. I also reinstalled the kubuntu-desktop. Here is where the battle started. I tried to launch my new system. It always crashed on the load up to "bluetooth" devices, after several reboots, it magically seemed to get pass that. But then instead of giving me a log in, it just started the shutdown sequence. God damn, I'm not a Linux expert...

At some point I did manage to start X, but it seemed weird. I reconfigured it with dpkg-reconfigure. After we unsuccesful boots I somehow managed to get the graphical log in screen. Of course my mouse & sound didn't work, and it seemed a little unresponsive after the login. After 30min I got the mouse working, and found out that the sound was just set to 0 from the numerous trackbars in the mixer (which are too complicated, I don't know what they all mean). I restored the packages I lost during the update. This whole process took about 4 hours, it was filled with problems that fixed themselves somehow with enough numbers of reboots, my efforts were quite random, weird thing.

Well, now that it works, few remarks:
1) My monitor now runs at 100Hz, finally!!
2) Looks good!
3) Systems settings -> display; doesn't work
4) All this consumed unbelievable amount of harddisk
5) New NVIDIA driver certainly works better in some ways, but also it(?) cut my FPS in half in glxgears

For beta it looks promising, just the difficulty of updating, at least in the current stage, is overwhelmingly hard!

[tonihele]

Re: My 5.10 -> 6.06 story

The mouse problem seems to continue, as well as the bluetooth crash on log out. They just work sometime

What are these in the xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
 Driver    "wacom"
 Identifier  "stylus"
 Option    "Device"    "/dev/wacom"     # Change to 
                           # /dev/input/event
                           # for USB
 Option    "Type"     "stylus"
 Option    "ForceDevice"  "ISDV4"        # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Driver    "wacom"
 Identifier  "eraser"
 Option    "Device"    "/dev/wacom"     # Change to 
                           # /dev/input/event
                           # for USB
 Option    "Type"     "eraser"
 Option    "ForceDevice"  "ISDV4"        # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
 Driver    "wacom"
 Identifier  "cursor"
 Option    "Device"    "/dev/wacom"     # Change to 
                           # /dev/input/event
                           # for USB
 Option    "Type"     "cursor"
 Option    "ForceDevice"  "ISDV4"        # Tablet PC ONLY
EndSection

[askrieger]

Re: My 5.10 -> 6.06 story

"Wacom" is a particular brand of tablet input device, much preferred by graphic artists and (for some unfathomable, to me, reason) aeronautical engineers. Someone else, has had a problem with wacom stanzas showing up in their xorg.conf file. I believe they found a solution, but I don't remember what it was. Search the forums for the solution.

[Cliff76]

Re: My 5.10 -> 6.06 story

I recently upgraded too. Though I didn't have the difficulties you did, my upgrade was by no means smooth. It started from my niave fear of "apt-get dist-upgrade". Under Mepis I was told this was not a good way to upgrade as it would turn Mepis into Debian. I somehow got confused and thought it wasn't the best way to upgrade in Kubuntu either. I searched the Ubuntu/Kubuntu sites for the preferred way to upgrade to Dapper. I came across a blurb on the Ubuntu site that mentioned "update-manager -d". I tried it then discovered that upgrade-manager was Ubuntu's version of Adept. I downloaded and installed upgrade manager anyway since I couldn't find an equivalent easy solution on Kubuntu's site. (In retrospect I could have just used Adept but I wasn't sure if I had to manually update my sources.list and the single command with upgrade-manager seemed, well, easier.) I ran the command a few days ago right before leaving the office for the day hoping to come in the next day to a fresh new desktop. Well it hung overnight on a prompt asking whether or not to start the upgrade. Assuming the stuff had been downloaded already I figured it shouldn't take more than an hour to upgrade and answered yes. To my surprise it started the download process. (I sure wish it would have just downloaded the stuff then prompted me!) I could've cancelled and tried again that night. (I wanted the download and install to run unattended overnight.) Instead I was ambitious and let it continue figuring it would prompt me before it actually started upgrading stuff. 3 hours into the process (we have a shared 768Mb/s connection in our office with a failing internet gateway appliance that makes everything feel like dialup) I noticed the upgrade had begun. I realized this because the CPU fan on my Dell got louder and I saw the little taskbar CPU monitor spike. I switched to the update-manager window to confirm my suspicions. I knew I was at the point of no return. I was also in mid change in my application development tasks (being a Java developer at work made the upgrade risky since I had some high priority work that was due that day). I knew that I couldn't stray from my IDE (IntelliJ Idea) or close any of the windows I had opened for fear of not being able to get them back during the upgrade. (I knew this from the experience of a major upgrade in Mepis I performed while working.) The upgrade continued for about an hour or so when it then froze. I figure it was about 65-70% finished and everything was locked up. I couldn't Ctrl+Alt+F1, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, or any hotkey to terminate any running processes consuming precious resources. I knew what had happened. I had too much going on during the upgrade. My IDE running with the heap pushed to about 768M, my Java appserver running in the background with an equivalent heap size, I think I had Eclipse running as well as a bunch of other things (Amarok, instant messager, Konqueror windows, etc.) I blew it. I had no choice but to slowly kill everything with the If-All-Else-Fails reboot sequence, Alt+SysRqs r,s,e,i,u,b. My Dell rebooted into some weird command line (ash) while I walked away to explain the situation to my buddy. Long story short, I went through several reboots trying the different kernels I had installed until I could get to a bash command line with at least some functionality. I tried apt-get dist-upgrade at this point, which informed me to run dpkg --configure or something like that. When I did the install picked up where it left off taking another 20-30 minutes then finishing. I rebooted and couldn't get into a GUI. I tried startx and it complained about my video driver being missing. I still have Mepis on a secondary partition so Iwas also able to get online and post a S.O.S. on the forums here. (By the way I didn't realize my Mepis partition had become practically unusable from experimenting with looking glass 3d from Sun a while back, so I had almost as much trouble getting to my GUI there too.) I booted back to my broken Kubuntu partition and tried to use aptitude to locate and install nvidia-glx (I couldn't rememeber the name of the package or packages I needed.) When I had no luck in aptitude (I suck @ cmd line tools) I just tried apt-get install nvidia-glx and prayed. My prayers were answered as I was able to finally reboot into my GUI and everything appeared operational. Moral to the story, never try a major upgrade while you work. Next upgrade I'll run outside of X in overnight and make sure it has all the resources it need to finish.

[tonihele]

Re: My 5.10 -> 6.06 story

I took the command line route, I don't trust the graphical thingies to update themselves while running and I suspect that this could result in problems.

For the "wacom" entries, I found (from the forum) that they can just be deleted. Naturally, since I don't have that kind of equipment...

But in all, Kubuntu 6.04 FINAL could be a product that I could install on my parents' computer. No longer having necessary to obtain stupid Windows & Office licences. And without me having to put up with "stupid linux, how do I..." calls!