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Ubuntu 8.10 has been released

Posted Oct 31, 2008 23:50 UTC (Fri) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763)
Parent article: Ubuntu 8.10 has been released

Lovely. And it looks exactly the same. Which is fine, but we were promised more. What's new is that:

my machine can no longer shut down - it boots up fine, but shutting down requires a fat finger on the power button
jumping around tracks in a music player still doesn't work (rhythmbox just crashes, again). I know, cutting edge stuff, but hey...
burning music CDs doesn't work either, because brasero just crashes, every time. Yes, there are alternative apps, thank goodness
vhosts seems to have stopped working in Apache
it takes even longer to boot! Man, do I need a 3.33GHz quad core with 16GB RAM and and big-iron disk arrays just to boot in <1 minute? Whatever happened to the promise of upstart?
it still can't run an Intel PRO/E network card at 100MBit - that's right, it's back to 10Mbit networking again! Good thing my DSL is still just marginally slower than that, so there's no bottleneck

Sorry for the rant - I still love Linux, and it's still immeasurably superior in many ways, but I get frustrated sometimes. Which makes me want to go and buy a Mac. Or a stone tablet.

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Ubuntu 8.10 has been released

Posted Nov 1, 2008 5:43 UTC (Sat) by rbill (guest, #54993) [Link]

I, too, upgraded to the new release of Kubuntu. It did not go smoothly at all. :-/ My Dell Inspiron B120 (512 meg) ran just fine with Hardy. Now I have a lot of little pieces to play with. Some of the problems I experienced:

- It took 6 hours to do the upgrade; in addition to the 6 to download,
but that was not unexpected yesterday). The disk (40 gig, 25% full)
thrashed for hours. Eventually, adept_manager crashed. I managed to
get everything installed. My used disk space went from 25% to 60%
*after* deleting the download packages! Whoa!

- After rebooting, Phonon couldn't detect the sound chip and sound no
works.

- It can't find my swap partition even though there is an fstab entry.
Complains about invalid UUID.

- The screen has an annoying flicker every ~8-10 seconds, which makes
it nearly unusable. This is a reported bug going back a few weeks.
There is a workaround involving stopping RANDR in services, if you
can figure out how to get to the System > Advanced tab. I couldn't
find it in Plasma.

- Wireless is partially broken. It can see nodes, but dies if I try
to connect to them.

These alone are showstopper bugs for me. And, no I'm not a Linux newbie.
I've been using is as my sole OS since 1994. (Slackware, Red Hat, Debian
and now Kubuntu)

Intrepid sounded nice. I'd really like to play with it. I'll try to fix what broke. If I can't, I'll do a fresh install. :-/ If that still doesn't work, it's back to Hardy for me and I'll wait until to see what happens come next April. And, unless new packages are backported to Hardy (or I compile it myself), I'll be stuck using older versions.

Needless to say, I'm disappointed. A few releases ago, the developers held up the release a week or two because it still needed work. I kind of wish they did it with Intrepid.

So this is not really an angry rant. I realize the developers do a lot of hard work and I appreciate it! Really! Though pitfalls like I experienced give more arguments to those claiming Linux isn't viable alternative to Windows.

some success

Posted Nov 1, 2008 22:51 UTC (Sat) by rbill (guest, #54993) [Link]

Following up my own comment, I did a fresh install of 8.10. It went much better. The annoying screen flicker remained, but at least I was able to apply the workaround. Sadly, though wireless is still broken. I had no luck getting working. It looks to be a known bug since before the release date.
Too bad, for me it is a definite showstopper. :-(

Regretfully, I have to return to using Hardy. When I see the bug fixed, I'll give it another try.

I got a better impression of Intrepid with a mostly working system. It certainly looks promising. Based on my experience, doing fresh install over an upgrade is the better way to go.

some success

Posted Nov 4, 2008 10:30 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Based on my experience, doing fresh install over an upgrade is the better way to go.

Thanks Ubuntu, for really improving the Debian system. :/

some success

Posted Nov 7, 2008 4:58 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

To give some more anecdote facts, I also upgraded to Kubuntu 8.10.
All went ok, no problems whatsoever. All hardware detected all right. Even the compiz 3D effects where working all right (except for some "noise" just after opening new windows and before the window background is filled).

Very nice visual, cools icons, but... I hate KDE4...
Please! Don't release beta software as fully complete!!!

To redeem myself, instead of "downgrading" back to my 8.04 32-bit Kubuntu, I decided to finally try the 8.04.1 64-bit Kubuntu, so I can still say I made an upgrade to my system :-)

On the other hand, everything seems to be working on 64-bits as well, after the usual fight with the sound card volume controls.

Ubuntu 8.10 has been released

Posted Nov 1, 2008 12:54 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I had a stone tablet once, but it crushed.