honest.knave

I figured I’d document for posterity some of the issues I had with my Kubuntu 7.10 → 8.04 update. I approach all major updates with trepidation, and as usual, it was justified.

First of all, the updater application worked well. I had to expand the window to show the terminal when it updated OpenVPN, which would hang waiting for me to enter my username and password. (This actually happened twice). Also, it is occasionally interactive, asking you to look at changes it wants to make to certain config files. This is a good thing, but it would be nice to have all the questions come at the beginning or the end, so the update can be unattended (since it takes several hours).

System doesn’t boot

The moment of truth: I allow the updater to restart my computer. Grub appears momentarily, then it tries to start the 2.6.24 kernel. Kubuntu’s splash screen appears and the progress bar pulses back and forth, seemingly forever. I give up after seeing no HDD activity, and reboot the machine via the keyboard. I switch back to kernel 2.6.22, and the system boots, but has some issues with nVidia’s driver and X.org.

Ignoring these for the moment, I disable the boot splash screen and the quiet boot options in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, and reboot. The kernel outputs a bunch of messages like:

ata3: failed to IDENTIFY
ata3: failed to recover some devices

It retries this several times, and then dumps me to a busybox shell. So far, I’m not impressed with this update. Ubuntu is supposed to be the OS that anyone can use, and it’s taking an awful lot of my Linux experience to figure this out. After googling the messages, I find this bug report, which turns out to be the problem. The solution is to add the option “pci=nomsi” to my boot parameters. I readily admit I have no idea what this does, but it fixed my problem. The 2.6.24 kernel now boots cleanly.

Files overwritten

Even though the updater was kind enough to ask my permission to update some files, there were a couple cases where allowing it seemed like the right idea. I allowed it to update my php.ini and my xorg.conf files. It screwed them both up. So I had to fix my modelines for my display (detected native resolution of 1792×1344 on my 1920×1200 monitor… wtf?), and fix my php.ini to get my wiki working again.

Firefox 3.0 Beta

Apparently, they decided to ship a beta version of Firefox with this new release. It’s sort of logical from the point of view that this is an LTS release (long-term support), which means the Ubuntu crew will support this release for the next three years. They don’t want to be supporting Firefox 2 for that long, and that makes sense. However, as an end user, I specifically held off on Firefox 3 because it’s still beta. Even Firefox 2 still feels like a beta product, with its memory usage pattern and frequent locking up on pages with Flash or heavy Javascript use. Now I’m an FF 3 beta user, let’s hope that goes well.

Update June 23, 2008: Firefox 3.0 eventually came out officially. Well, it’s driving me nuts. The flash plugin dies five or six times a day, requiring me to restart the browser. Also, the UI locks up during heavy disk activity (like when I’ve got a big compile job going at the same time), and freezes for 5 to 10 seconds at a time. Sometimes, it never wakes up. Today, I’d finally had enough ,and installed the “firefox-2″ package, and I’m happy again. I can’t wait for a nice, small WebKit browser.

Tracker

After the update, my system seemed slower than usual, especially launching applications from a cold start. top reveals a process called trackerd as the culprit. Tracker is some kind of filesystem indexing program, to optimize searches. It seems like it’s a Gnome product, so it really shouldn’t be running on my KDE system. Well, after the update, sure enough, trackerd is running, and consuming a ridiculous amount of resources.

Trackerd was steadily using 15 to 25% of my CPU, and as far as I can tell, a much higher percentage of my hard drive bandwidth. Killing it from the command line sped up my desktop, but it rises from the dead shortly thereafter, hogging my resources all over again. Googling turned out to be not very helpful, but I ultimately figured out how to disable it: run gnome-control-center from the command line, under “Other” open “Searching and Indexing”, and in there, you can disable the indexing service. It seems to be gone for good now; we’ll see.

GTK glitch

For some reason, checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK applications (such as Firefox) don’t show their state when focused. This means you click a checkbox, and it doesn’t appear checked until you click somewhere else. Terrible. I fixed this by opening the KDE System Settings → Appearance → GTK Styles and Fonts, and changing to “Use another style”. Several of them appear to work fine, and I settled on “Glossy” as a moderately attractive style. Ubuntu has an open bug for this issue.

Crappy fonts

A lot of the text I’m seeing now looks worse than it used to. I’ve never been an expert in the Linux font area, so I don’t know what changed. But the default anti-aliasing looks super fuzzy:

I tried disabling anti-aliasing, and it looks even worse:

Not all fonts look this bad, but all of them seem to look at least slightly worse after the update. Check out the kerning in “Select which”, great stuff. This is the kind of thing that tempts me to get a Mac.

Update: Found this reddit thread (total coincidence that I was using reddit as my example) via the Ubuntu forums, and his solution fixes my sans-serif fonts in Firefox. After much trial and error, I also substituted “DejaVu Serif” for “Liberation Serif”, and my serif fonts look much sharper. This is how reddit looks now, with the sans-serif fix:

RAID rebuilding

For some reason, as I write this, my RAID arrays are currently rebuilding. All four, in sequence. This could be due to the boot issue where the ata3 and ata4 devices weren’t detected, so it was perceived as a RAID drive failure. I’m not experiencing any data loss or stability issues as a result, but it does affect HDD performance. The arrays appear to be in good shape.

Conclusion

Make sure you have a day to waste when you upgrade to hardy. I suspect a lot of my issues are due to KDE being a second-class citizen in the Ubuntu world. There also seems to be the mindset that Ubuntu absolutely has to release every April and October, regardless of the amount of testing it has received.

I give a lot of credit to the Ubuntu team for keeping this great OS going, but the bottom line is it’s still Linux, and it’s still a maintenance nightmare.