Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Posted Oct 22, 2007 7:06 UTC (Mon) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959)
In reply to: Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released by pkolloch
Parent article: Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

I am a recent convert (Linux since Yggdrasil days, Mandrake since 1998) to Kubuntu, and the
graphical upgrade failed twice for me.  It would download some application, but die in step 2
of some checklist by saying that the downloaded file was corrupt.  I have no clue what it was
trying to download.

As an experiment (it was a machine that was "disposable" in some sense, and anyway I had /home
on a different partition) I started with a clean install of Kubuntu 7.04, and did all the
upgrades purely from the command line.

Worked fine.

Draw your own conclusions :-)

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Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Posted Oct 22, 2007 17:11 UTC (Mon) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

IIRC, the installation instructions said that the "aptitude dist-upgrade" method would
probably not work. It might not clean all old packages, etc. Are they saying that on purpose
so they only have to support one upgrade path ? 

I am really weary of doing experiments. I run Ubuntu (Kubuntu) on my laptop, and I have to use
it every day, so it is not "disposable". Luckily, all my other development machines and
servers have Debian Stable, which is immune from such problems. 

Makes me wonder, though. We use Kubuntu on a couple of computers at the office. Given this,
they are definitely not getting upgraded any time soon, and we are considering eventually
moving them to Etch + Backports.

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Posted Oct 25, 2007 7:47 UTC (Thu) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104) [Link]

My laptop running Kubuntu has been offline for about six weeks and I decided to update it to Gutsy Gibbon two days ago. Like some of the other posters the GUI upgrade tools failed, but after running "apt_get update; apt-get -y upgrade" a few times the update succeeded and it works fine.

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Posted Oct 25, 2007 18:45 UTC (Thu) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

(Sorry for the long and somewhat frustrated comment :-)

I am fairly confident that even if my upgrade breaks, I will eventually be able to fix it. I
did it on a couple of machines the last time (upgrade to Feisty), and this time there are more
workarounds posted, etc. The question is why should I bother.

Take a look at the comments on the main bug (btw, it is getting more duplicates every day, so
the problem keeps happening):

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/...

One poster says "...this upgrade should not be attempted whatsoever by anyone who uses their
machine for work, school, or other important operations.". This is how our Kubuntu machines
are used - downtime is not acceptable. How can we take Kubunutu seriously now ?

What worries me is that it shouldn't be this way. Upgrading the OS is an extremely critical
issue. A critical bug in it should not have been left unfixed for two (!!!) releases.

In my mind this puts a serious question whether I should be wasting time with Kubuntu at all
(supposedly Ubuntu is better tested, but alas KDE is a requirement for me, so it is not an
option). Even though Debian is somewhat less polished, and one has to use lots of backports,
it simply never breaks.

Lets say hypothetically that I had purchased support from Canonical (it has been a definite
possibility, but is getting less likely). How would they help me ? They would tell me the
known workaround, but I still would have to apply it manually on all machines that I have to
upgrade. And I would definitely be pissed if I had to use support twice for the same problem
in two consecutive releases.

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Posted Oct 25, 2007 22:57 UTC (Thu) by andybruk (subscriber, #31794) [Link]

If you think ubuntu is better tested but you need kubuntu, install ubuntu, and then install
the kubuntu-desktop package. You can then run all your KDE apps through Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" released

Posted Oct 26, 2007 18:36 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

Installing hundreds of megabytes of Gnome packages, only to enable upgrading  KDE, is not any
more acceptable than applying the manual workarounds for this problem. 

If Kubuntu can't be upgraded independently, it should not be offered as a separate
distribution. Of course in that case users who require KDE would turn to completely different
distros, and Canonical probably doesn't want that. You can't eat your cake and have it too;
that is - you can't attract KDE users without actually supporting KDE.