Upgrade 9.04 to 9.10: pros and cons

Hey guys.

I'm struggling to decide whether to risk doing a distro-upgrade from my current Jaunty install to the new Karmic, or to do a fresh install and spend time reconfiguring it to my current setup which I like. I would love to hear your opinions or experiences.

The current install is 9.04 UNR on ext 3 but using the classic gnome desktop. The machine is a AOA150 (ZG5).

Some qestions I have in mind are: Will it run better on an ext4 file system? Will an upgrade mess with things like appearance, compiz/emerald settings, program customisations? Will battery life improve? Are there likely to be any hardware issues with an upgrade (i know that everything seems to work well off a live USB)? Will old default programs be removed, like OpenOffice, Firefox 3.0, to keep things tidy?

Ta

 

"It depends." You can try a test install of 9.10 to a bootable SD memory card without touching anything on your 9.04 install. Note that if you use partimage to create a backup of your existing install, partimage does not support EXT4, so if you do a clean install and choose EXT4, you can't go back to 9.04 easily.

For me, the deal killer was that 9.10 suspends automatically when you plug/unplug from wall power; 9.04 does not do this. It's a minor inconvenience, but quite annoying if you are in the middle of a file transfer, as suspend drops your wifi connection.

I have done a lot of tweaking of 9.04 in the past 6 months, so I plan to try an upgrade, rather than lose all my changes with a fresh install. But for now, 9.04 meets my needs and 9.10 does not, so I'm in no hurry. I'll keep booting occasionally from the SD card to see what changes as 9.10 matures.

 

ext4 performs much better then ext3. IMO the best way to convert to ext3 is with a fresh installation.

firefox 3.5 performs much better then firefox 3.0

You can boot 9.10 from a live cd and try it =)

 

There is no need to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 to run FF 3.5. Chrome runs circles around FireFox (but a recent update introduced problems with some pulldown menus on web pages).

EXT4 offers a small improvement, but, as you mention, really needs to be done as part of a new install, rather than an upgrade.

Source: http://izanbardprince.wordpress.com/200 ... uy-jaunty/

At 3 seconds savings per boot, it would take me several years to equal the effort required for me to re-apply all my changes to 9.04. If I were running UNR, I might upgrade to 9.10, but for Ubuntu desktop, I would lose some functionality by going to 9.10, so I'm in no rush.

 

9.10 loads faster and has many other improvements I like. If you do a normal upgrade, ext4 is not installed, so you don't have to worry about compatibility issues - with partimage for example. On the other hand, ext4 does a great part in speed improvements of Ubuntu 9.10.

You can always convert your drive to ext4 afterwards, but think about: full performance of ext4 is only gained by files written after the drive conversion. I tried it out. After one week of 9.10, I reinstalled the last image I had of my 9.04 partition, then I installed ext4 and grub2 before the upgrade to 9.10. So every file written in the upgrade could benefit from ext4. And there's a lot files to be written in a distribution upgrade, kernel included.

I can say that there is a speed bump in the boot process when 9.10 is installed on a ext4 drive compared to a later conversion of the drive. So, pros and cons? Definitely pro. The only compatibility problem I encountered is with Back In Time in root mode.

 

I'm partially pro, because the new NBR interface is nice. ;-)

But boot time is slow.

My ZG5 had 9.04 installed as describe in the post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1270547

I upgraded to 9.10 using the Update manager.

After reboot, I got the following error message:

One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted...

and boot time took over 2 minutes.

I believe it's because the filesystem of my /boot and root are ext2.

I couldn't find any data on the Web describing how to fix, therefore I decided to reinstall.

I decided to repartition, to have a /home partition, still using ext2 as filesystem but during the installation I keep getting the error message that it cannot mount one of the partition and fall back to the partition utility.

I end up having to use ext4 filesystem to have the install successful.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that ext4 is the best fs for SSD.

But the main problem is that boot time is slow, very slow, close to 2 minutes without FireFox loaded, compare to 9.04 where I could boot and have Firefox loaded in 45 seconds.

Anyway to improve this?

15/11/2009 : Bug 432089 is discussing the issue, look they found a solution for slow HD, but not for SSD. Hope it get fix in the future, for now I'm trying Moblin 2.1 that boot in 15 seconds ;-) but lack codecs and KeePass. ;-(

Regards,

HVL

 

Is anybody taking advantage of the 2gb of cloud storage offered by Ubuntu 9.10?

 

System->Preferences->Power Management
Select "On Battery Power" tab
Under Actions select:-
Put computer to sleep when: Never.

Hardly a deal killer.

 

The Debian/Ubuntu package management system is very good, but I tried an upgrade and it just got too messy.

in general, I don't like upgrades. Back in the day when I used Windows (admittedly this is a looooong time ago) upgrades were always a disaster, but even on Mac OS X (which I love) it isn't always a success. Now that I think about it, Windows got so crufty that it was often worth doing a fresh install of the same version .

In addition, despite the time it takes, I like to take the opportunity to clean things up and do a fresh install.

So, my advice is do a fresh install unless you are short of time and don't mind your machine getting a bit crufty.

 

Yes and no. I tried it out since the public beta in Ubuntu 9.04 and in a Ubuntu 9.10 beta-environment I had on another partition. It worked very well, the Ubuntu One folders on both partitions and the web were synced perfectly. Only the deletion of a folder in the web storage gave a bit of headache, but this is fixed by now.

But: a week before the final 9.10 came out, Ubuntu One went mad. The were compatibility issues with the server that still go on. If you tried to get an early update by installing the karmic-proposed source, it would connect to the server, but sync only partially. So, Ubuntu One was fine in beta, now it's crap. I guess the people at Canonical just got overwhelmed when Ubuntu 9.10 came out with built-in Ubuntu One services. Just look at the bug reports filed on their Launchpad-page: the same stuff over and over and over again.

One more thing: Ubuntu One depends heavily on the Gnome Network-Manager, but that doesn't work well for me. I had to switch to wicd (I have a AO531 / ZG8). So, every time I want to add the computer again to the cloud service, I have to switch temporarily back to network-manager-gnome. As of this morning, I decided to give up for now with Ubuntu One.

 

At least with an upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10, this absolutely is not the case. I just booted 9.10 from my SD card, and changed both AC and battery power management to "Never" and the problem still exists as I described it. Furthermore, the wake from suspend is flaky. For me this is absolutely a deal killer for 9.10. Ubuntu 9.04 does everything I need; 9.10 does not, at this time.

 

Totally d'accord. I just made the step to replace my two week old upgraded version with a fresh install. I got rid with a lot of problems (Ubuntu One issues, for example) and discovered some karmic-ready upgrades of third party software I wouldn't have noticed without having been forced to install them again. It was worth the time.

 

Upgrade vs clean install is what I suspect as well. Since I have an experimental installation (no useful data) on an 8gb SD card, clean install will be my next experiment.

 

More experiments with 9.10 on an Acer D150, 1 gb RAM, 160 gb HDD, Ubuntu 9.04 in a 32 gb EXT3 partition.

Downloaded the 9.10 installer, and put it on a 2 gb Kensington Data Traveler USB.
26 minutes for default install, using EXT4 on an 8 gb Transcend SD memory card.
Booted successfully from the SD card: 46 seconds. Shut down and booted again, 1:05.
The problem I previously reported with suspend being invoked, and WiFi connectivity dropping when unplugging or plugging in the AC power is unchanged.
Downloaded and installed all available updates as of Nov 13, 2009, approx. 20 minutes.
Shut down and reboot. Multiple error messages:
EXT4-fs error (device sdb1): ext4_lookup: deleted inode referenced: nnnnnn
Unable to boot successfully using Ctrl-D. I could probably fix this by running fsck against the SD card, but why bother?

I have now invested 5 hours on a successful upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10, plus another hour for an unsuccessful clean install. Since these were on an SD card, rather than on my HDD, the only thing I have lost is time.

If 9.10 works for you, fine; it doesn't work satisfactorily for me. 9.04 is completely stable for me, so I'm not going to invest any more time in 9.10 experiments until 2010 -- perhaps 9.10 will have settled down by then. I don't have a huge interest in playing with an OS, per se; it's just a tool that lets me do things. If it doesn't work, I'm not very interested in spending hours or days trying to make it work when I have a usable alternative.

If you have 9.04 installed, and you have invested a significant amount of time in configuring/customizing it, and decide to try 9.10, for goodness sake, make a backup first. Partimage seems to be the most used tool (although I haven't yet tried a restore).

 

Excellent advice! I prefer fsarchiver to partimage. Partimage requires restoration into a partition at least as large as the partition that was backed up, whereas fsarchiver does not. However, partimage is the more mature tool, and I must say, it worked very well for me too.

 

i did the upgrade on an hp totem as isue on playing dvd unlike 904 the open office is newer in 910 as is the firefox if your children use fire fox on 904 with sight blocker it is not supported in 910 or better said firefox 3.5 the dvd play will be in kaffine verses totem or dragon player