nothing but trouble with 8.10.

[Guest]

I upgraded to 8.10 last night and into this morning. First, the upgrade seemed to have completed with no issues, until i logged in. KDE 3.5.2 crashed, numerous times. i did a full upgrade, much to my dismay it was not a full upgrade. after 2 hours of upgrading packages i still have over 1000 that didn't get upgraded, after i downloaded almost 1.5GB of stuff during the night. So now i have KDE 4.2.1 installed, that was a horrible nightmare to get apt to actually download the list of packages from the ibex Dev repository. I logged in, UH-OH, X is totally screwed up. The resolution was wrong, even though my original xorg config file was still unchanged. KDE refused to load any of the "widgets" that i have heard so much about. When pidgin opened up, it refused to stay connected when i minimized it to the system tray, and the kmenu only had 2 applications listed in it. So i ctrl+alt+bksp out to the console, did _another_ dpkg --dist-upgrade and waited while it downloaded another 847 packages. Somewhere in the middle of dpkg settings them all up, a few failed. it didn't tell me. when it was done, it rebooted the computer for me. This was a very bad move because it uninstalled all of my old kernels, and it didn't set the new one up. i had to get a cd out just to boot into it so i could fix that. I got it to boot using 2.6.19, but i had no sound, no network, no usb support. This is "normal", or so it says on a few posts on the ubuntu forums. I know its not, ive been using Linux since 1994, I'm not a newbie. After checking in /lib for modules, i discovered that i had no /lib/modules/*. it was empty. So i extracted the kernel packages and manually placed files where they should be. Now this takes us to my current issue. 2.6.27-7 seems to have found a LAN card that isn't in my computer and makes it the default route. my sound skips no matter what application I'm using (i tried pulse, tried alsa with no pulse, tried loading different sound modules), when i do the alt+f2 to bring up the run dialog, nothing shows up, but i can just type a command and it will load. i still cant get any damn widgets to work, and now no users, except for root, can use anything that is USB. Also, the dumbest thing ever just happened. digikam was working 10 minutes ago, i connected my camera, copied the pictures to an album and closed it. my wife took another picture, i plugged the camera in, digikam refused to load. i opened it in a terminal and now i have lib errors with kipi. nothing changed since it was last working.

If any of you have any ideas about this, or recommend i try anything, please let me know.

[theAdmiral]

Re: nothing but trouble with 8.10.

I cannot believe that I am making suggestions to an experienced user, as I myself am a noob. But, if you like we can try to take this step by step.

I suggest downloading the Kubuntu *.iso, and checksumming it. Then burning it to CD, then run it. Then at the screen giving you the option to check disk for errors, select that that. Then if it checks out fine, install it.

I am assuming you have an external drive to back up files to. Sorry about your bad upgrade process not working out for you. But, this is obviously a complicated mess, and in my opinion, the only efficient way to fix it is to start from scratch.

theAdmiral

[SHadowmeph]

Re: nothing but trouble with 8.10.

I have never had a successful upgrade with any Linux distro I have tried I have always ended up ( in the end) backing up everything and doing a clean install

[emastro]

Re: nothing but trouble with 8.10.

I have to say that although in my not-so-humble opinion 8.10 is far from being fully usable, my upgrade from 8.04.1 KDE4-remix to 8.10 has been the first successful upgrade in about 10 years of using and managing Linux. And while KDE4 kept dying about twice a day, requiring a reboot, with visual effects enabled and/or the proprietary ATI drivers enabled, now it's been stable for over a week without a crash.

On the other hand, on my old IBM laptop the upgrade failed twice, leaving it in a completely unusable state - even recovering what was in the /home partition was tricky. In the end I burned an 8.10 DVD and installed from scratch, and even then it took three goes to get to a point where it actually works.

It appears (just my impression, mind you) that if even one or two packages fail to be downloaded for a network timeout - or do not pass checksum - during the upgrade or the install, you'll save time by just zapping everything and installing from scratch again, because if that happens not only the upgrade process is buggered, but it has also buggered your existing install way beyond repair before you even realise it.

Eugenio

P.S. Adept 3 is appalling, but that's material for another thread.

[The Liquidator]

Re: nothing but trouble with 8.10.

If I can add my 2 pence worth here, in my experience the upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 is far too "big bang" to be relied upon not to give trouble. You firstly have serious upgrades of many packages, and secondly a new version of kde. In 8.04 you could run kde3 and 4 alongside each other, each had their own .kde directory in home(.kde and .kde4). When upgrading to 8.10, the .kde directory for kde 4 is simply .kde i.e the kde3 one is "upgraded". Therein is the source of many a conflict. I was only able to get kde 4 to properly load by renaming the home .kde file to .kde.old and letting kde4 set up a new one on launch.

A linux maestro would be able to do that from a command line of course. Those like me who rely far more on a GUI would, at that point be in a hopeless mess.

One possible solution to this would be to upgrade with a ubuntu cd. First launch would be into gnome in which you can run pretty much all applications anyway. Once up and running you can then install the kubuntu desktop and associated stuff and importantly if something goes wrong with kde you can fix it from within gnome or, if an update has messed it up (possible during the KDE4 development process) you can at leastl keep working.