Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

[geezer]

The final shoe has dropped.

When I upgraded from 7.10 to 8.04, Kubuntu would no longer recognize and mount removable media. USB pen drives in particular. Also, A USB floppy drive.

Did a fresh install of 8.04 from a Live CD and that seemed to solve the problem. At least it did for a few days.

Today, 8.04 again does not recognize and automatically mount removable media.

This seems to be persistent and recurring problem for 8.04 for me and at least a few others.

I give up and am doing a fresh install from my 7.10 Live CD.

Maybe when they get to 8.1 or higher I will reconsider and try upgrading again.

Until then, 8.04 is just not reliable enough.

Until then I salute all of those on the cutting edge with 8.04 and hope that you get it reliable enough for use.

[dibl]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

Bummer -- sorry to hear it. It must be a hardware thing, dependent on the motherboard or chipset or something. The USB interface seems to be fine on my platform --- I've used 2 memory sticks and a card reader with no issues.

[Snowhog]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

I too, have no problems with my USB storage devices: a USB floppy and two USB IDE HDs. I have a USB seven-port hub that I connect my thumb drives to, and they work also.

[geezer]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

Bummer -- sorry to hear it. It must be a hardware thing, dependent on the motherboard or chipset or something. The USB interface seems to be fine on my platform --- I've used 2 memory sticks and a card reader with no issues.

Well if it is a h/w issue, then it is peculiar to 8.04. Something changed in 8.04 as regards the USB bus. I have since found that one of my USB scanners needs to be unplugged and plugged in again for Xsane to find it. If I open Kinfocenter, 90% of the USB devices are NOT listed. ALL of them were always there in 7.10.

NONE of these problems existed under 7.10.

I could believe a h/w issue alone if I had not used 7.10 with NO PROBLEMS. I have 18 USB ports on this machine with scanners, keyboard, mouse, printers, lights and a few other things plugged into USB. Losing USB is not a trivial issue for me.

I'm very happy that 8.04 just works for you and wished it did for me also. Unfortunately that is NOT the case. and that is why I going BACK to 7.10.

[geezer]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

Seems I may be staying with 8.04 after all

I made the initial post on this thread on 5-22 with the intention on doing an install from a 7.10 Live CD.

Checked on-line to see if there was a Live CD newer than the one I had and couldn't find any 7.10 Live CD downloads so decided to stick with the one I had.

Wasn't able to get to the install until the next day. Booted 8.04 to backup everything (even though I now have '/home/name' on a separate partition) and 8.04 surprised me - it detected and automatically mounted all USB removable media devices.

Still didn't trust it, so I held off on the 7.10 install and checked the USB removable devices every day after booting 8.04.

It's been a week, and 8.04 has worked every day now.

Don't know what happened on 5-22, but hopefully it won't repeat.

There have been a lot of daily updates to 8.04 since 5-22 with a new kernel (16 to 17). One of those updates fixed the annoying message that a USB pen drive could not be ejected after being unmounted. I wonder why it couldn't be ejected ?

[kde2k]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

That is great news geezer! What i have loved about 8.04 so far is the constant improvements that seem to appear on a daily basis. says a lot for the development team!
Cheers,
kde2k

[dibl]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

I confess -- I had no idea 8.04 could read and manage 18 USB devices. Impressive! Glad to hear it worked out.

[marshallbanana]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

Actually I've got to say I'm impressed with hardys management of external usb hds. Prior to 8.04 it would always mount my external hd as root which was really annoying as it meant that I had to kdesu its arse anytime I wanted to put something on it. I'm pleased to note though that 8.04 mounts it as the current user allowing me to edit it normally.
Thanks devs! I really appreciate it.

[geezer]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

I confess -- I had no idea 8.04 could read and manage 18 USB devices. Impressive! Glad to hear it worked out.

Yes I have 8 USB ports on the back of the computer and 2 on the front. I have 2 4 port hubs plugged into 2 of the back ports. I could have used only one with a bigger hub, but then it would require it's own power plug and power sockets are getting scarcer than USB ports.

Hmm, counting again, it seems that there are really 16 "active" ports since 2 of the back ports are used for the hubs.

I haven't run out of usable ports yet, but they do get filled rapidly with keyboard, mouse, printers - many, scanners (down to 2 from 3), laptop light for if the power fails, floppy drive (sneaker net to my wife's ancient computer - she doesn't want to learn a new one and since it's still working she doesn't have to), APC UPS, and a few other things that escape my memory right now. USB has turned out to be an excellent way to add peripherals.

I keep 2 open for pen drives. I plug the pen drives in when I need to back up critical data. I backup all critical data several times a day to the 2 pen drives - that way I have 2 copies just in case. Critical in that it would take a looooong time to replace the data and a lot couldn't be. Quicker and less expansive than DVDs or CDs. I still backup to DVD (dual layer) periodically when I think of it. But the pen drives have taken a lot of the pressure off me to back-up to DVD or CD often.

[dwsdad]

Re: Abandoning 8.04, back to 7.10

What I'm finding is that 8.04 will recognize my external DVD writer, give me the pop-up "what should I do?" window, and throw an icon on the Desktop. 5 min later, the icon is gone and the USB port light on the hub where the DVD is plugged in has no light. The DVD will not eject using the button on the front; I have to power cycle the DVD in order to remove the DVD.

The other thing I've noticed is that when it is first recognized, the DVD loads as /dev/scd1. Pop into K3b to burn something and it tells me no such device as /dev/scd1. It sees my internal CD fine as /dev/scd0.

I haven't tried a thumb drive yet, but after reading this thread, I'm going to see 8.04 handles it on my system.