Ubuntu new release

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is out since a few days, so I updated a few machines that I had around.

Those machines are mainly friends, parents and family, since I don't use Ubuntu.

This update seems to be pretty for many people on many forums...

Machines

I had 8 machines to migrate, 7 laptops, 4 of them were updating from Ubuntu 8.4 and the other had to migrate from 8.10.

Migrations

The migrations I did were always 7.10=>8.4=>8.10, because it seemed to be wiser.

Moreover, I tried both ways of using update-manager -d and edition of /etc/apt/sources.lists.

Results

8.4

The results of the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.4 were way better than when I did those updates when 8.4 was out.

I had one issue with one X.org with an outdated ATI driver, but it wasn't difficult to fix if you are not afraid of non-GUI edition of files.

8.10

The results of this migration were, as expected, not good.

Only one laptop, the one with the less packages and without Compiz worked out of the box, using update-manager.

Update

The upgrading process went bad for 3 machines, where some packages didn't want to get updated correctly, I had to use dpkg --force-all to fix those kind of issues.

Restart

The restart after upgrade were fast, and working more or less:

  • 3 laptops work perfectly
  • 3 of the remaining 5 have a broken X, and X taking 100% of proc or a faulting Compiz. One was ATI, the two others ones where nVidia.
  • 3 had a non-working network stack, wireless or ethernet.
  • 1 had no X, no wireless, no FireWire and a very slow startup;

Fixing

Most of the fixing where not difficult, but implied some of those:

  • X.org conffile edition
  • GNOME configuration files reset
  • Reinstallation of drivers
  • Deactivation of Compiz

And for the last and completly broken one, I reinstalled it from scratch.

Network Manager

On all of them, the new network manager is NOT able to connect to my FreeBox Wifi, that has been working for a long time now.

The issue is that this network manager doesn't seem to understand that a WPA2 password can be a passphrase and not only a HexaKey. Whenever I use the passphrase and fails to connect, it shows me an hexadecimal password that is not what I filed in.

Conclusion

Well, as usual, I am not impressed by the Ubuntu upgrade. It is a very good and easy-to-use distribution, but upgrading Ubuntu distribution is way more difficult than it should be.