Friday 6 November 2009

Ubuntu 9.10: 64-bit Installation

Okay so I've just installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) to my desktop. It's not going great.

The first attempt was an "in place upgrade". The reasoning behind this was simple. I had a lot of notes in Tomboy Notes that I didn't want to lose. Previous experience has taught me that Tomboy Notes doesn't deal with upgrades well. However Ubuntu One has a Tomboy Notes synchronisation feature. So the reasoning was simple. Do an inplace upgrade. Upload my notes. Do a clean install later if I need to.

After the in-place upgrade was done I noticed the PC was very unresponsive. minutes pass by while I wait for the top panel menus to respond. I don't know what the issue is. But the 32-bit version running on my laptop doesn't suffer from this problem. But hey! No problem. I thought I'd just do a clean install. Same problem!

Now admittedly I did preserve my home directory. So perhaps there's some sort of conflict with my old settings. So my next plan of action is to wipe the system clean and start completely fresh. If that doesn't work I'll install the 32-bit version. Perhaps the 64-bit copy is experiencing issues? Who knows.

It's not all bad though. I have an SLI setup. Previously this would mean I'd have to use the text based installer. But this time the standard live CD handled my dual graphics cards with no issues. The installer can even deal with RAID arrays like Nvidia Stripe. It will even offer to install Ubuntu to the RAID array.

Considering very little seems to have changed on the desktop, RAID and SLI support in the installer would suggest all the big changes (if there are any) in Ubuntu 9.10 have taken place under the hood.

Edit 08-11-2009: As I suspected some settings from my previous installation were causing issues. With a 100% fresh install everything seems to be working fine. My advice is, do a 100% completely fresh install. Remember to back up your /home directory first and anything else you don't want to lose.

4 comments:

  1. I'm not sure what kind of Tomboy upgrade issues you might have had, but here's something to keep in mind if you do a clean install and want to manually copy your notes to the new install: we've changed where the notes are stored. Here's a handy reference:

    http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/Directories

    So make sure you copy the .note files to the right place. :-)

    And sorry for your other troubles; I don't use Ubuntu myself, but it always sucks when upgrades don't go as well as they should.

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  2. In the past when i simply copied the notes directory, the notes never seemed to appear in the application. Could be I was doing it wrong. But either way the notes synchronisation worked a treat.

    Thanks for the tip btw :-)

    As a clean install it works just fine. So there's clearly something wrong with the way the in place upgrade has been implemented this time. But hey! SLI now works with the standard desktop Live CD and so do RAID arrays. So it's not all bad.

    Two steps forward. One step back.

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  3. Hey Aikiwolfie, Ideastormer Jorge here, I upgraded my work computer from 9.04 to 9.10 and it wouldn't boot at first, finally got in through single user after a few crash attempts, I removed modem-manager not sure how that got in there was hanging after that but still didn't need it anyway. My NFS mounts were causing the problem to boot up, so I commented them out and it booted up, well sort of. After some package updating and fixing my sources.list (our systems are cfengine maintained so it was causing secondary issues). Now its pretty good. I hear ya on the Tomyboy app, I use knotes and in 9.04 it was messed up big time, now in 9.10 they fixed the issues so its good, the yin-yang of your issue. Notes on the desktop are nice, I used Tomboy a bit but not enough notes to want to try that!

    Laters!

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  4. Jorge!!! How ya doing?

    I use Tomboy Notes simpley because it's already installed. Any tips or useful info snipets I want to keep get put in a note until I can either write them up to something I can put on my blog or decide i don't need it any longer.

    So far us 9.10 goes I think Canonical can rest easy purely because it's not an LTS release. If you use your PC for anything uber important that's totally mission critical to your life then stick with the LTS releases. They simply tend to work better.

    With this version Canonical took a few steps forward in some areas and a few steps back in others. They also broke new ground for Ubuntu by providing an integrated "cloud" service.

    Sure Ubuntu One does suck. It doesn't fo much. But it's free and it's a first attempt. Something open source can always count on is being forgiven for short comings purely because it's free.

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