Author Topic: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...  (Read 1173 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
I have been asked why I posted this in the news section on the front page. Well, for kick off, some of the news I'd seem worried me (more than a little) .. however I though (by now) some of the kinks should've been ironed out, but that I really ought to try it before making any more comments. Now I have, I'm running on 10.04 at this very moment.

The upgrade started at ~ 3pm and by 8pm I sort of had something I could work with again.

Chances of the average user completing this process, ZERO.

Pro's of upgrade: I'm sure I'll find some nice shiney new stuff (besides the theme) but not seen anything yet.

Con's, ok, here we go;

1. My graphics setup did not survive the upgrade and I could not progress until I'd deleted /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I experienced many reboots, hardware driver fixes etc before reaching this conclusion, just so's people know, the most recent nVidia driver was behaving badly so I tried the last but one version (173) which was a machine freezing non-starter. Ubuntu have disabled (Ctrl-Alt) consoles, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and as far as I can see the boot / recovery process, which makes things very interesting indeed. Fortunately I have a stack of Live CD's here to fall back on.

2. When finally going again, there appears to be a super huge major bug in the NVidia drivers when used with Xinerama. When xinerama is turned on, all 4 of your screens operate effectively as one and you can move your mouse / drag+drop between all four screens - an absolutely invaluable facility. The desktop (through some logic that escapes me) picks one of your screens as the "master" and this is the screen that is blessed with menus / panels. However, if this screen isn't at the end of your chain of monitors (i.e. monitor #0) , as soon as you move your mouse off the left hand side of the screen, you're dead. For a random period the mouse will flutter and dance .. eventually you will be logged out and presented with a login prompt again.

3. Once you finally get a stable system, you wonder what the hell KSMD is and why it's eating half your CPU. Apparently it's a feature which is enhanced further by editing /etc/default/qemu-kvm and editing the line that reads KSM_ENABLED=0 and replacing the 0 with a 1.

4. Now you're wondering why your load average is running at above '1' when previously it was typically running at 0.2 or lower. Not totally figured that one out yet but I'm pretty sure it's tied to the graphics system. Certainly killing off 10 instances of gkrellm that I use to watch different things has a major impact on the load average.

Note; At the moment, I need a machine that is 4x faster to get the same speed as I was getting under 9.10.

5. To get your 4x speed you turn off CPU scaling on your processors and let loose with 4 x 3.G CPU's and it's all sort of back to normal .. except your CPU temp hits the ceiling. Solution; install 2x larger case fans.

Go on, ask me if I've had a fun afternoon!

Revised text for the news article;

AVOID UBUNTU 10.04 LIKE THE PLAGUE - Use 9.10 instead!
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #1 on: May 21, 2010, 10:53:42 pm »
Ok, next, Empathy doesn't work. It offers to import your contacts from Pidgin but does no such thing and leaves you with a blank screen.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2010, 12:19:56 am »
Ah, Ok, it's not just me .. everyone seems to be having performance / high load average problems with 10.04.

Methinks 10.04 was released ~  6 months before it was ready !!
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2010, 02:13:49 pm »
Ok, here's my problem(s).

Note;

a. System Idle time .vs. Load Average
b. Xorg memory usage

Performance is sluggish and as soon as I pretty much do anything the load average hits 1+.

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Online Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 662
  • Karma: 18
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • PCNetSpec
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2010, 03:09:21 pm »
Am I missing something here... 4 users?... I can only see root, bind and gareth

How is memory allocated to Xorg... on a percentage basis, or what is currently being used?... my Xorg mem usage is 6.1%... but you have 8.5 times the memory I have on this laptop... load average (if left to settle) 0.03
« Last Edit: May 22, 2010, 03:44:22 pm by Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec) »
WARNING: You are logged into reality as 'root'

logging in as 'insane' is the only safe option.

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #5 on: May 22, 2010, 03:36:27 pm »
Erm, this is a shot from "top" .. see the "Tasks:" count .. (!)
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #6 on: May 22, 2010, 03:37:53 pm »
And  "users" in this context is the number of xterm's I have open, the listing down the left is the effective UID of each process, but background processes don't count at users ...  ;)
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Online Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 662
  • Karma: 18
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • PCNetSpec
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #7 on: May 22, 2010, 03:47:32 pm »
heh... never noticed that before... sure enough, open another terminal and "bingo" another user :)
WARNING: You are logged into reality as 'root'

logging in as 'insane' is the only safe option.

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #8 on: May 24, 2010, 02:02:11 pm »
Ok, my machine is now 100% again.

Solution: clean install of 9.10 from scratch.

Conclusion: 10.04 has one or more critical defects in one of the following areas that causes the overall performance of the machine to drop to 10% or normal;

a. The Kernel
b. The nVidia screen driver
c. A combination of the two

I'm not about to debug this at the moment, but if you upgrade to 10.04 then be aware you may find the performance is "pants" and if you google around you will find a number of articles about whether Windows 7 is faster than 10.04 .. as far as I'm concerned 10.04 is Ubuntu's vista.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline bondo101

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
  • Karma: 0
  • I've just joined!
    • View Profile
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #9 on: May 25, 2010, 01:05:31 am »
 What about a clean install?   I had it running after the up grade but like you said not much of anything worked. I went back to karmic . I hope they fix lucid ran very fast with little computer power, memory processor. i have been on ubuntu forum since 2008.

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #10 on: May 25, 2010, 10:35:59 am »
Yup, tried two clean installs, same results.

I've been sent something to try by the guys at Ubuntu, will hopefully get chance to do it later on, not hopeful tho'.

Quote
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa; sudo apt-get update; sudo
apt-get install nvidia-glx-185
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #11 on: May 25, 2010, 08:04:43 pm »
Guess what? No change what-so-ever.

Note; I've now installed / upgraded a few machines to 10.04, success rate seems to be about 50%.

(i.e. 50%, works fine, no problem, 50% there's a show stopper which can sometimes be fixed, and in the case of my main machine, apparently not ...)
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline danielgrosvenor

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 9
  • Karma: 0
  • I've just joined!
    • View Profile
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #12 on: June 01, 2010, 05:26:42 pm »
My Dell notebook arrives tomorrow.  Core 2 Duo ULV SU7300, Intel WiFi Link 5100, 512MB Nvidia GeForce G 105M.

My plan is to wipe the hard drive immediately and jump head-first into Ubuntu x64.  Judging from this thread it looks like a lot of the problems people are encountering come from upgrading from Karmic to Lucid.  As I'll be starting from scratch might this increase the argument for going straight in with Lucid?

If I install Lucid, what's a good test to perform to find out if I'm in that 50% of people who just can't run it without major grief?

Offline Mad Penguin

  • Here today, gone .. no wait, still here!
  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 617
  • Karma: 10003
  • Gender: Male
    • View Profile
    • Linux in the UK
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #13 on: June 01, 2010, 06:47:07 pm »
Mmm, there is no easy test as the performance issue only appears under certain types of usage. On a new machine, I'd be inclined to install 10.04 and see if it works well enough for you - then be prepared to install 9.10 if you're not happy with 10. The major issue here is for people who rely on their computer for business purposes and who cannot afford to upgrade to something that will prevent them from working.

(and upgrading to something that then takes a couple of days to undo / get right again is less than impressive ...)

I think if Ubuntu are going to be this crap it really does make a case for the Operating System snapshot / restore system that Windows XP has ...
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The box said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed LINUX
(D)inner not ready: (A)bort (R)etry (P)izza?

Offline Wraithguard

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 10
  • Karma: 0
  • Gender: Male
  • I've just joined!
    • View Profile
Re: WARNING: We recommend you DO NOT upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 ...
« Reply #14 on: June 21, 2010, 06:37:40 pm »
Mad Penguin firstly "you da man!" Secondly i've been running Lucid for a while now on dual boot with XP pro too and I have noticed the heavy load in Ubuntu also i have a AMD Athlon 64 x2, nVidia GT220 1gb card and 2 gig corsair xtreme ram. I installed and played around with conky for a while and got hooked its real pretty and Shows what i need. But the loads are pathetic the CPU jumps around above 50% the graphics card is throttleing like crazy and the memory usage is just bonkers even with just the desktop running on its own its well above 900meg at idle.. Really hope Linux sort this soon as i seriously want to ditch Micro$oft and can't be bothered going through the pain of a fresh karmic install.

Keep up the good work guys.

WG
If at first you don't succeed, then sky diving isn't for you.