I upgraded two of my home systems from Breezy to Dapper Kubuntu. One is AMD-64, one is i386. I write about this stuff for a living, and would rather tinker than work anyday, so it here we are. The upgrade went OK, but not nearly as well as a plain-vanilla Debian installation. And the K/Ubuntu devs seem determined to make printing painful.
TurboPrint users be warned- you need to upgrade.
First of all, here is your handy-dandy four-step guide to upgrading to a new Ubuntu release:
-run “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade” to bring your Breezy installation into a current state
-edit /etc/apt/sources.list. Comment out all the non-official Ubuntu repositories. Change all the “breezy” entries in the rest of them to “dapper”
-run “apt-get update”
-run “apt-get dist-upgrade”
The download and installation went smoothly. However, a number of irritating things happened.
A lot of configs were stomped. Yes, I had backups of my dotfiles and /etc, but that’s no excuse- configs should not be touched. This is a bug.
A lot of applications were removed. This is the real puzzler- never, in all of my years of putting Debian throught its paces, did it remove applications on its own. The Dapper upgrade ate Gparted, K9Copy, K3b, and several others. This is a bug.
Printing is STILL fuxxored, and it’s a shame, because the 1.2 release of CUPS is very nice. Finally, you can perform complete server administration from the CUPS web interface. Except on K/Ubuntu, because the devs, for no good reason, continue to disable the CUPS web interface. Fortunately the front page of the CUPS web page tells you how to re-enable it. The Gnome printer manager is no good for server administration, it is NOT a good substitute for the CUPS web. The KDE printer manager is pretty nice, but it still has problems. And that’s no good for non-KDE users.
TurboPrint users, you need to upgrade your TurboPrint installation. If you have licensed any 1.xx version you get free upgrades for all 1.xx versions. Complete instructions are on the TurboPrint Web site.
The Gutenprint drivers are beautiful, and give you a wider choice of color printers.
Overall, K/Ubuntu is a nice distribution. It’s not the best, not by a long shot- it still has a lot of kinks to work out. But it has a lot going for it, like a friendly community, nice default package selections, and a great PR machine. Now all they need is a lot fewer bugs.
Hmmmm - I didn't have any problems with config files getting stomped but then I used the graphical update manager ("update_manager -d") and it prommpted me numerous times about what to do with various modified files. I use TurboPrint with my Canon i950 (which is shared with a Windows machine via IPP). I didn't have to upgrade TurboPrint, but my printing did break when I upgraded and I had to make one small tweak:
http://marc.abramowitz.info/archives/2006/06/06/fixing-my-printer-in-ubuntu-dapper-drake/
Fair comment Carla.
I was part of the development process (reporting bugs) for Dapper and I definitely noticed a big uptick in bugs this release. A lot of them were not the developers fault really but were more upstream related. Thus there was an absolute ton of kernel bugs which were showstoppers for me until quite close to release.
A lot of these fell in the category of hardware regressions and are the fault really of the linux kernel developers. Andrew Morton has commented on this recently I believe.
Canonical have hired a new QA guy (Simon Law http://sfllaw.livejournal.com/)
so hopefully some of these things will improve in the future. Might be worth interviewing him.....
Hi Richo,
That's the fun part of using a Debian derivative- is it a Debian problem, or something new and shiny, and invented just for Ubuntu? :)
I really wish that printing, scanning, and hotplug would move into the current century. It's always a pain in the arse, and it seems to me that Linux is mature enough to have these problems solved, rather than chronic.
Interestingly, on my two upgraded systems one moved to udev (/etc/udev) and the other one still has whatever the old system was (/etc/hotplug). Which leads to me another rant- where TF is the documention for this stuff?? I don't even know where to start looking. A friend pointed me to /usr/share/doc/udev, which is not very useful to us dumb ole end-lusers. Of course Debian is famous for making substantial changes without including decent user documentation, but I have this forlorn hope that this too will change.
Anyway, despite all the ranting and hassles, I like Ubuntu, and I think it's given the Debian project and Linux in general a nice boost. How about everyone slow down, take some deep breaths, and don't release anything until, at a minimum, basic necessary functions work right. Please pretty please?
Carla, I agree with your last comment wholeheartedly. I think most of us in the community will gladly wait another month or two or three in order to get something that actually works right. I like Ubuntu. I also like Fedora which I just ranted a bit about. I just wish I wouldn't have to work around so many issues. For an experienced user or systems admin yes, we can get by just fine. For a less experienced user this just plain doesn't help get them to like Linux and to want to use it.
I have yet to see any release of any distro that didn't have some rather obnoxious bug in it. Thankfully both the Ubuntu and Fedora developers are rather responsive and do try and fix things.