Ubuntu 8.04 upgrade…FAIL

UPDATE: Further fiddling confirms the FAIL (below).

UPDATE: Reported bug and found a workaround for VMWare (below).

The upgrade from 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to 8.04 (Hardy Heron) has not been smooth for me:

  • Auto-detect sound did not work initially. I installed the i386 kernel modules which broke networking. Reverting to generic kernel modules seems to have fixed both networking as well as sound. Very odd. UPDATE: Hold that. It fixed it for a short while. Its broken again on the generic kernel. Setting the sound settings to ALSA instead of Autodetect works around the issue. Symptom is when you try to play any sound, you get the message “audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=music: Failed to connect stream: Invalid argument”. I’ll be opening a bug report about this later in the weekend.
    UPDATE 2: Looks like its a common bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/191027
  • Firefox 3.0b5 is installed by default, breaking all of my add ons. Will have to try to downgrade back to Firefox 2.0. UPDATE: Rolling back to firefox-2 wasn’t very smooth either. Stuck with 3.0b5 for now, waiting for the add ons to catch up.
  • Looks like compiz-fusion was uninstalled, breaking my theme (bye bye Aero look). Will have to investigate. UPDATE: Turns out that only ‘emerald –replace’ was dropped out of Sessions. Added that back in and presto! Aero look back. Happy again.
  • The Awm dock is buggered, with the launcher icons floating well above the dock. UPDATE: Still buggered.
  • And worst for last…VMWare no longer works as it depends on vmware-server-kernel-modules and libssl0.9.7 which I can’t get to install. Will also have to investigate. UPDATE: The instructions to get this working are here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4357442&postcount=10

So far, not too impressed…

2 Responses to “Ubuntu 8.04 upgrade…FAIL”

  1. outside  on April 29th, 2008

    I’ve also had a terrible experience upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04. Seemingly every other package could not be installed due to dependency errors, failure to move backup copies of files around, or other general failures.

    It also seems to have enabled the laptop power meter on my desktop box, broken the Python installs, etc.

    Last of all upon reboot it’s attempting to start a wireless card (none installed) and all kinds of laptop bits (the scripts for which are missing).

    It finally hangs when running /etc/rc.local (not changed from 7.10 default).

    If this is the Linux state of the art I’m going back to FreeBSD….

  2. Seth  on April 29th, 2008

    indeed…

    I had a very smooth initial install of Ubuntu 7.04 and an equally smooth upgrade to 7.10. Just from 7.10 to 8.04, several things were broken. Seems like they rushed out this release.

    Luckily, I’ve managed to fix/workaround most of the showstoppers for me.

    I also came across the “Great Ubuntu Girlfriend Experiment” which also shows how much further Ubuntu (Linux+Gnome in general) have to go before its ready for prime time: http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/


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