Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)

Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by bloopletech on Thursday October 17, 2013 @09:46PM (#6569302)

Nvidia, AMD, or Intel? Proprietary or open source drivers?

I often have problems during upgrades using the proprietary drivers. The solution is usually: 1. Uninstall proprietary drivers. 2. Reboot, make sure the fallback mesa/vesa works (i.e. you can boot to graphical login). 3. Install proprietary drivers again. 4. Reboot, make sure the graphical login works, then run glxinfo | grep -i opengl, and make sure the renderer is GeForce or Radeon or whatever, NOT "Mesa".

Yes, it's stupid, and yes, we shouldn't have these problems in 2013, but the proprietary drivers tend to just have more compatibility issues.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by Daishiman on Thursday October 17, 2013 @02:02PM (#6567033)

I have always found that continous upgrade eventually break the system. A clean install should be the recommended choice.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by Theriac25 on Thursday October 17, 2013 @02:30PM (#6567251)

That's just beyond retarded. I weep when people have been conditioned by Canonical (and Microsoft) to accept this.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by candl on Thursday October 17, 2013 @06:57PM (#6568741)

Here's a video of a continuous upgrade from ms-dos through every windows version all up to windows 7 (a timespan of ~20 years) that proves it's possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by gavinpc on Friday October 18, 2013 @01:24AM (#6569923)

The whole time I was watching this I was thinking, how would I explain to a normal human being why it is that I can't look away. Windows 3.0 especially took me back to my adolescence, like a smell.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by bashinator on Thursday October 17, 2013 @03:25PM (#6567577)

Especially since the upstream distro (Debian) is absolutely phenomenal when it comes to in-place major upgrades.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by Daishiman on Thursday October 17, 2013 @02:57PM (#6567417)

It's not all Canonical's faults. A highly customized install with a few extra libs here and there and some proprietary softare can easily wreck havoc on a system.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by zanny on Thursday October 17, 2013 @08:24PM (#6569074)

I had a continuous Arch install for 4 years without massive breakage through half a dozen major switches, including the fs layout and the systemd transition.

I just upgraded to an SSD and decided to clean slate rather than carry extra fs creep baggage that isn't linked to a package to remove, but I still have that partition around, and I'm pretty sure if I upgraded it it might still boot.

It is why I like rolling releases - rather than have catastrophic breakage every half year, you continuously migrate upwards. It means occasionally you need to pull up a web browser to see why your desktop is missing, but its better than doing a dist-upgrade and getting an unbootable system.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by gw on Thursday October 17, 2013 @03:15PM (#6567525)

The same problem persisted after I did a fresh install, so in this case there is something that it doesn't like about my computer, a Lenovo G780.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by icebraining on Friday October 18, 2013 @05:12AM (#6570442)

My Debian installation has been the same for six years and survived moving from Gnome → XFCE → Fluxbox → Awesome and installing bleeding-edge mesa and radeon drivers, plus other kinds on tinkering. Oh, and moving to an SSD.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by sampo on Thursday October 17, 2013 @02:54PM (#6567402)

I have been updating my Lenovo laptop every 6 months since 7.03 and it's still going fine.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by chrismorgan on Friday October 18, 2013 @01:40AM (#6569960)

And I since 9.10. Sure, I've had my problems with it due to certain customisations applied, but to the best of my knowledge nothing that I haven't brought on myself, and I've been able to sort it out each time without significant trouble.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by aclevernickname on Saturday October 19, 2013 @07:40AM (#6576053)

7.04 install upgraded to 13.10 here. Worst I had to do was apt-get -f install after an apt-get dist-upgrade. So six years now.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by kolev on Thursday October 17, 2013 @03:16PM (#6567534)

Yes, same experience. Unfortunately, for the peace of mind, you should always rebuild - in-place upgrades for Desktop never work smoothly.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by asveikau on Thursday October 17, 2013 @04:27PM (#6567909)

I guess I should stop using my Debian machines where I did an install in previous decades (decades, plural) and copied the setup from hard drive to hard drive across several physical machine rebuilds. Up to now I had no idea that this never works smoothly.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by Daishiman on Friday October 18, 2013 @12:40AM (#6569803)

If you're the sort of person that likes to try out stuff from different places, including compiled binaries, non-repo packages, and other fun stuff, eventually stuff will break. A lot of desktop pieces of software have config files that keep changing.

I've found that keeping your old /home around and a copy of installed packages works well enough for most situations.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by asveikau on Friday October 18, 2013 @11:13AM (#6571805)

Actually I do keep around a few old binaries, and I have more often seen something else: software that no longer compiles with a modern compiler, but the binary I built in 2000 still works.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by kolev on Thursday October 17, 2013 @08:42PM (#6569129)

Debian != Ubuntu

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by asveikau on Thursday October 17, 2013 @09:45PM (#6569301)

So?

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by kolev on Thursday October 17, 2013 @10:48PM (#6569496)

We're talking about Ubuntu here - that was my point.

I've been upgrading Ubuntu Desktop for years (a decade, singular) and I've always been struggling - especially if I ventured to install an alpha and then keep upgrading that. Compared to OS X, on which I always upgrade to the first Developer Preview and keep upgrading on, although OS X comes with problems, too, the GM usually fixes it all up. With Ubuntu, it's best to script your environment and rebuild clean. At least my experience. Garbage always piles up otherwise!

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by asveikau on Friday October 18, 2013 @11:17AM (#6571834)

And my point was that you shouldn't let one distro's failures set your expectations so low that this is acceptable and normal.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by kintamanimatt on Thursday October 17, 2013 @03:30PM (#6567600)

I've only ever had one hose my system but that's because I locked the screen while the upgrade was in progress. The upgrade never finished because I couldn't unlock and answer any of its conflict resolution questions.

Today's upgrade was pretty smooth and uneventful.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by hpaavola on Thursday October 17, 2013 @01:37PM (#6566865)

Mine (Asus Zenbook ux31a) doesn't even boot to dekstop anymore with the default kernel. X server just says fatal error, no screens found. Using kernel 3.8 now and things seems to work.

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Re:Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) by hpaavola on Friday October 18, 2013 @02:58AM (#6570152)

And it's a kernel bug: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59841

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