Upgrade to Kubuntu Intrepid

Usually I’ve upgraded a month or two before the stable release to the latest Kubuntu version. Now, for some reason I’m way behind: only 4 days left before the launch of Intrepid Ibex, the 8.10 release! Urgent need to upgrade!

Note: this upgrade was done before the stable release was made so some of these bugs I’ve faced here will have been fixed before you read this!!

Generally I’ve been happy with Hardy except for few last weeks: I’ve been hit by two bugs (I know I should be able to provide you the links to the bugreps.. sorry!):

1. nvidia proprietary drivers produce random stuff on my screen – and sometimes flip the screen upside down! This should be fixed in Intrepid with new drivers.
2. After login my the the keyboard malfunctions as my alt key would be pressed all the time. This means I can’t write, only move windows around the screen. I have no idea what does this but I hope it’s gone in Intrepid. If not else, a clean install will help.

So this motivates me to upgrade and if it fails, go for a clean install.

Setup

I’m running Kubuntu 8.04.1 w. KDE 4.1.2, 64-bit. Core2Duo E6600 2.4GHz with 2G of RAM and Asus nVidia 9600GS display adaptor.

I have two identical 400G disks as follows:
sda1 & sdb1 = /, RAID1 (md0), 40G
sda2 & sdb2 = empty to try other distros (not raid), 2x10G
sda3 & sdb3 = 2x swap (not raid), 2x1G
sda4 & sdb4 = extended for sda5&sdb5
sda5 & sdb5 = /home, RAID1 (md1), 320G

You can have a closer look at my disk config here.

Backup

I make backups on two 250G LaCie USB2 drives asynchronously so that I always have an older copy of the files around. So far 250G has been enough :)

This is the command to back up the home directory:
sudo rsync -van –progress –stats –delete-before /home/ /media/disk/2008-10-26-backup/home
(note, this is a ‘cold run’ and doesn’t actually yet copy anything. Remove the n from ‘-van’ to run commit the actual sync!)

Before running this I removed thumbnails (~./thumbnails), emptyed the trash bin (~/.local/share/Trash/files) and made a cleanup to remove and organize all random files laying around the home dir (I’m not using desktop anymore to store files:) I had around 312 000 Openstreetmap map files in the ‘temp’ dir that I moved away from home (to /var/Temp) not to be copied over to USB. I still had to back up almost 400 000 files. I takes hours!

Number of files: 399266
Number of files transferred: 315563
Total file size: 187866414971 bytes
Total transferred file size: 127279083505 bytes
Literal data: 127279109081 bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 10398576
File list generation time: 180.738 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 127319513161
Total bytes received: 7164748

sent 127319513161 bytes  received 7164748 bytes  14353945.99 bytes/sec
total size is 187866414971  speedup is 1.48

I backed up /etc, /home and the list of installed packages.

Upgrade

As told here, I run the upgrade command as follows:

kdesudo "adept_manager --dist-upgrade-devel"

Just to get a popup telling me ‘Command not found!’. I had earlier installed a prerelease of adept 2 so I now run sudo apt-get install adept to make sure things are ok. Still a no. Installing adept-manager didn’t help either. I removed the adept2 PPA line from repository list, removed adept and adept-manager and reinstalled the older stable version. This helped and Adept started. ‘Version upgrade’ and off we go.

54 packages are going to be removed. 208 packages are going to be installed. 1247 packages are going to be upgraded. You have to download a total of 1723M. This download will take about 20 minutes etc..

I saw the list of packages to be installed, upgraded and removed. I’d like to be able to save this list to a file, it might be useful later.

In the morning a message was waiting for me: virtualbox-ose_2.0.2-dfsg-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb package could not be installed, but the upgrade can still continue and I should concider filing a bug report about this. I pressed the ‘Report Bug’ button and a new Firefox window opened with ‘know your rights’ button in the notification bar. I couldn’t login to launchpad so I copied the address to another firefox window I had running and confirmed a bugrep #286022. #210212 was also around. I got another error message that virtualbox-ose could not be upgraded – and the same for update-manager. I clicked ‘report problem…’ on both and after the update-manager bug was processed all installer windows had disappeared. In the notification area there was this blue icon that told me to restart. So I did. Just to see that the first start gave me a black screen and the second took me to terminal. I tried all kind of magic, installed some missing packages, tried old xorg configs and stuff. No error messages on Xorg, just a restart of X when trying to log in.

Reinstallation

I downloaded the kubuntu-8.10-rc-alternate-amd64 image and made a live usb on another computer with isotostick.sh. The installation kept asking me for a cd and was not able to recognize that it’s running from this ‘CD’, usb stick. I also tried unetbootin with no changes (so I later reported #290166). I decided to download the live cd and try with that.

While waiting for the image to download I had a closer look at the Kubuntu release notes/known issues and found #287488 – just by changing the default session type from KDM to KDE I was able to log in to Kubuntu Intrepid!!! This was supposed to be fixed before the stable release but was not so if you upgrade from Hardy/KDE4 to Intrepid, do remember to change the session type when you log in!!

How is it?

• Plasma stuff crashes every now and then
• Lancelot only crashes.
• My kde settings were still there on the new system. Good!
• Akregator didn’t remember everything but fetched me some 600 new messages and then crashed.
• Desktop & Kopete settings were gone
• Flash works on Frefox, not on Akregator
• Krunner crashed on the first run
• Kopete settings dialog was very slow
• Kopete is able to autoscale the window size
• Firefox looks more like KDE than earlier
• New nvidia drivers are FAST!
• Suspend and hibernate available in the menu. Didn’t try yet.

I like it! If you’ve done some customization I recommend a fresh install. If not then an upgrade should be fine but I have no experience on Hardy/KDE3 -> Intrepid/KDE4 -upgrade..

(some screenshots will possibly be added later)

What are your experiences?

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