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    #1

    18'04'1 - Took the plunge

    This is actually--as it turns out--#1 Testimonial.
    #2 Testimonial is below in Post #8 where I installed it in dual-boot with Windows on a laptop.

    #1 Testimonial.

    Took the plunge and installed 18.04.1. In fact, cowboy-style.

    I've been using 14.04. I got the 18.04.1 iso, checked it, used dd to make a live USB flash drive, and thought I'd run it and just mess around. I did that. For maybe 3 minutes (might of been 2.6, not real sure), and decided WTH to go ahead and do it.

    I usually take my time to upgrade, line up all the ducks, do my data backups, and proceed carefully. This time was different, to say the least. In the live session, I gathered all my user data on my /home, put it in one folder, and dragged it off to a flash drive. Backup done. Still in live session, installed gparted, ran it against my HDD where I had 12 partitions (on a GPT), including three ESPs and six OSs. I kept only sad1 = ESP (for my 14.04), wiped out the rest, reformatted the ESP FAT32, made a /, home, and swap, exited and started the 18.04.1 "Manual" installation, which went good and quick.

    I note that the installer does offer to make (via its "Use for" drop-downlist) an ESP for the user, a good thing. As for where to place the grub bootloader ... since mine is UEFI, it doesn't matter because GRUB will go into the active (my one and only) ESP; but I said "sda" because you have to say something.

    So, all went well. Just two glitches (remember, I d/l'd the 18.04.1 iso--not sure if that matters):
    -- In the live session, when I was ready I clicked Install Kubuntu, but it didn't work; so I rebooted and hit Install Kubuntu.
    -- After finishing the installation, I got "Please remove installation media and reboot." I removed the flash drive, hit Enter waited, but no re-boot! So I hit a hard re-boot and all went well.

    Setting up and configuring some apps went easy. I noticed that some of the apps took care of a lot of the configuring by default. E.g., my printer was recognized and hplip got installed. Chrome found my Firefox bookmarks on its own. A lot of apps are standard now, like Firefox, VLC, LibreOffice, etc. So the setup and configuring was just a lot of routine monkey motion this time, one app after another, and went smoothly. And I dragged my data (all in that one folder from 14.04) off that data flash drive and on to my new Desktop, which I'll sort out later.

    I wasn't much use to configuring Plasma, pretty much ran my 14.04 the way I ran XP, but didn't have much trouble getting the hang of the panels and widgets thing, kind of by trial and error. Losing your entire panel and losing your Trashcan are humbling experiences. For new people reading this, the kde.org support is pretty good; for example, start here and click on the links as you read:
    https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma#Panels .

    For some reason, the 18.04 seems to handle the browsers better than 14.04. I opened both Firefox and Chromium, opened multiple tabs in each, in each tab ran various puzzle-games-vids (like slots, tic-tac-toe, video ads, etc.), and it all seemed real snappy and quick with no crashes.

    I still have a short list to work through, but I've already concluded that 18.04.1 is great. Lucky that it is great -- as I wiped all the other OSs I had on the HDD. Like I said, this upgrade went cowboy-style.
    Last edited by Qqmike; Aug 06, 2018, 07:22 PM.
    An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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    #2
    Indeed it is!
    My son, the pgmr supervisor, inherited his son's Toshiba L55 Skullcandy laptop when my grandson determined that the Intel HD Graphics card wasn't fast enough to run games like Team Fortress 2 and others. So I reinstalled Kubuntu 18.04.1 on that laptop to include Btrfs so my son could explore it. (Wonder where he heard about it? )

    Found a bug. If one inadvertently skips the user info section the installer crashes on the install step when it attempts to create the prime user account. Rebooted the USB and did it right. Perfect install. He's going to love it!
    "A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
    – John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962.
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      #3
      My wife has an ASUS Q501LA laptop (2014), and I've been real tempted to put 18.04 on it, wiping out Windows 10 (and I may decide first to make the Windows 10 installer USB, not sure). She complains that Win 10 is slow, cumbersome, naggy, too many pop-up notices about too many things, etc.
      An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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        #4
        Originally posted by Qqmike View Post
        I had 12 partitions (on a GPT), including three ESPs and six OSs. I kept only sad1 = ESP (for my 14.04), wiped out the rest, reformatted the ESP FAT32, made a /, home, and swap, exited and started the 18.04.1 "Manual" installation, which went good and quick.
        What is ESP, please?
        Kubuntu 20.04
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          #5
          Originally posted by chimak111 View Post
          What is ESP, please?
          It's part of the new UEFI system. ESP stands for "EFI System Partition" and is a small (usually around 200Mb) Fat32 partition that contains bootloaders for operating systems. Linux Grub lives there on a UEFI system.
          Desktop PC: Intel Core-i5-4670 3.40Ghz, 16Gb Crucial ram, Asus H97-Plus MB, 128Gb Crucial SSD + 2Tb Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 HDD running Kubuntu 18.04 LTS and Kubuntu 14.04 LTS (on SSD).
          Laptop: HP EliteBook 8460p Core-i5-2540M, 4Gb ram, Transcend 120Gb SSD, currently running Deepin 15.8 and Manjaro KDE 18.
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            #6
            Originally posted by Rod J View Post
            It's part of the new UEFI system. ESP stands for "EFI System Partition" and is a small (usually around 200Mb) Fat32 partition that contains bootloaders for operating systems. Linux Grub lives there on a UEFI system.
            Thanks!

            Looks like I have one:
            Code:
            Number  Start   End     Size    File system     Name                  Flags
1      1049kB  525MB   524MB   fat32           EFI system partition  boot, esp
2      525MB   3747MB  3221MB  fat32           Basic data partition  msftdata
3      3747MB  195GB   191GB   ext4
6      195GB   509GB   315GB   ext4
5      509GB   826GB   317GB   ext4
4      992GB   1000GB  8312MB  linux-swap(v1)
            The msftdata one has Dell stuff on it because this laptop has Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "factory-installed".
            Kubuntu 20.04
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              #7
              chimak111, Yep, you got an ESP alright, a nice one -- they made it 524 MB, big enough for any possible conceivable thing you might wish to do, ever ... like load it up with kernel/initrd files ... which, I'm kidding around here, you would never probably do or need to do; but they did make it the "standard" larger size of 500MB+ for you, safely big enough. And, btw, it will hold bootloaders for ALL the operating systems you wish to put on your hard drive -- all the installed bootloaders will simply go into this same ESP.
              An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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                #8
                #2 testimonial!

                I installed 18.04.1 on a 4-year old laptop (ASUS QA501-LA), in dual-boot with Windows 10, and all went well, and 18.04.1 works great on that laptop.

                Details are here:

                Dual Boot Your Existing Windows 8/10 with Kubuntu
                https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...607#post418607
                An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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                  #9
                  Qqmike, I too took the plunge this past weekend. Double whammy on mine, two new SATA drives and a clean install

                  I started with a backup of /home (and /home/multimedia, on the second drive). Shut down, removed the old drives, installed the new drives, buttoned up the case. Started the machine to BIOS, set UEFI and turned off fast boot. I had plugged the 18.04.1 thumb drive in while installing the new drives, and the BIOS saw it - set that to the boot drive.

                  Restarted, set the WIFI password, selected Install Kubuntu and let 'er rip. Manual install option. Used the installer's partitioning tool, with an ESP (500MB) first, then / (37 GB), then /home (95GB), and SWAP (~16GB). The second drive was one partition (293GB), /home/multimedia. The installer partitioned and formatted everything correctly, and the install went very fast Just verified that the installer's partitioning tool did set GPT and the partitions, exactly as it was asked to do.

                  Last step was remove the unwanted junk, installed a few favorites, copied back the Firefox and Thunderbird data, and restored all the stuff back to /home/multimedia. Set a wallpaper, and a few settings. Rebooted again to a beautiful new install. It took almost no time at all - relatively, and works great!!!!!!!! Very happy with what I see so far and the only (very minor) disappointment was the Cantata application. Not a very intuitive UI, so I removed it and installed Clementine. Amarok probably would have also worked, but Clementine has yet to let me down.
                  Last edited by jglen490; Aug 06, 2018, 08:28 PM.
                  The next brick house on the left
                  Intel i7 11th Gen | 16GB | 1TB | KDE Plasma 5.27.11​| Kubuntu 24.04 | 6.8.0-31-generic
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                    #10
                    jglen490 -- Great! Sounds like you did a perfect job of it. I remember you talking about getting ready to do this when you get the time.

                    Used the installer's partitioning tool, ...
                    Yes, that's good. Our resident experts here have declared that they feel it is perfectly safe to use that tool. I only use gparted because I've always used gparted, and there was a time when we weren't always quite sure if the installer's partitioning tool was doing what it was supposed to do (a bit buggy for some users sometimes)--that probably goes back to around 8.04 or so.

                    Just verified that the installer's partitioning tool did set GPT and the partitions, exactly as it was asked to do.
                    Good idea!

                    Nice job!
                    An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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                      #11
                      18.04.1 has been working very well for me here. Think it's one of the easiest install I have done Lately. using old Dell 1564 laptop. Running very smooth.
                      Dave Kubuntu 20.04 Registered Linux User #462608

                      Wireless Script: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...5#post12350385
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                        #12
                        Yeah, same here, kc1di. For some reason, Firefox and Chrome are both working much better, more smoothly, faster on 18.04 than on 14.04. Firefox has been advertising is fast-ness, but I wasn't seeing it on 14.04, but I see it now on 18.04.

                        As my posts indicate, I installed 18.04 on a 4-year old Asus laptop for the spousal unit, and already, after just two hours, she much prefers it to Windows 10. We didn't wipe Win 10 off the laptop, I'll go there now and then to maintain it and get updates, but I can already see that she is done with it. It doesn't hurt to keep it there, we have plenty of space that she will never use on that laptop, and it does give me a playground for testing booting and such with Windows and Linux, if needed. Yes, 18.04 really looks good and runs--for me--like a bat outa h&ll! (btw, my desktop PC here is only an i5 with 8 GB RAM.)
                        An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Qqmike View Post
                          jglen490 -- Great! Sounds like you did a perfect job of it. I remember you talking about getting ready to do this when you get the time.

                          Yes, that's good. Our resident experts here have declared that they feel it is perfectly safe to use that tool. I only use gparted because I've always used gparted, and there was a time when we weren't always quite sure if the installer's partitioning tool was doing what it was supposed to do (a bit buggy for some users sometimes)--that probably goes back to around 8.04 or so.

                          Good idea!

                          Nice job!
                          Yep. I had a bit of a hiccup with 18.04.0. In retrospect, it was probably due to not setting the firmware correctly and then not getting an expected response from the installer. All is well now, lot's of lessons learned about UEFI, which is no longer as dark a place as first thought. It's like pictures of medieval maps I've seen where certain unknown lands were simply marked as "Here, there be dragons" ... no more dragons

                          I appreciated the comments about doing the journey mentally first - I made notes. Worked great, and many thanks to the advice here.
                          The next brick house on the left
                          Intel i7 11th Gen | 16GB | 1TB | KDE Plasma 5.27.11​| Kubuntu 24.04 | 6.8.0-31-generic
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                            #14
                            Thanks for the thanks, jglen490.
                            An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. Charles Bukowski
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