Maverick upgrade experience

Here is my report on a recent Maverick Meerkat upgrade experience which although a little rough by some standards has a happy ending

First off, my hardware is vintage 2007 - a low-end Celeron 430  @ 1.80GHz CPU with Biostar P4M90-M7A motherboard, 1Gb RAM and  NVIDIA 8600GS GPU. (admittedly a lot more power than the average user in the developing world!)

With my 384kb broadband line, it took approximately 22hours to download and another 8 hours to install the new packages. Along the way I had to restart X twice after I got bored and booted up an old game which failed to respond to my clunky keyboard. Ubuntu took all this in its stride, resuming the downloading of the packages. Of course, I quit all my apps when it was installing to avoid any further mishaps and to give the CPU a chance to focus on what it was doing.

The installer came up with a number of config queries along the way, automatically diffing configs which I had either customised or which had been changed by software in Lucid.

I still find reading "diff" files a little difficult. One would expect the diff to be in a colour and not simply in b&w, but then again, maybe some people still have monochrome monitors?

I chose to keep my sysctl.conf which I had modified to avoid IPV6. I allowed the installer to install the maintainers version for ALSA as well as Grub and xorg.conf. My reasoning being that I wanted any innovation in these areas to be included in the upgrade. I had modified Grub because of a buggy Plymouth (see previous post) and my xorg.conf had been modified by a manual install of NVIDIA drivers, so I expected some complaints with the new boot.

After reading a few posts on Maverick upgrades which sounded a lot like my experience upgrading from Karmic to Lucid, I was waiting for the dreaded sight of a black screen and no X-server. Lo and behold, the system came right up without any complaints except for an issue with a secondary harddrive which has been giving me some trouble.

I logged in and was greeted with the following environment.

1. No sound

2. Slow GUI performance that resembled a lite form of the "wading through treakle" effect.

3. A system which swore it was still 10.04

4. A secondary NTFS drive which was not being recognised at boot but was still accessible.







5. At least 15 seconds of black space during boot

All five issues are enough to scare off the average novice. While I can't claim to be a Linux Veteran, I immediately had some misgivings about the performance issue, since I had compiled a 2.6.35-22-generic kernel for Lucid and had experienced similar issues which had been resolved by simply switching back to the default kernel. Also I had some previous trouble with the manually installed NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.35 driver which had been resolved by sticking with the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-195.36.31 driver.

Since I had taken the trouble to download a Maverick ISO to boot up the machine to see how it performed with the 2.6.35-22-generic kernel compiled by the Ubuntu Team, I resolved that my course of action would be to first tackle any NVIDIA driver problem before worrying about a kernel fallback strategy (fear of redundant hardware being my main concern.)

I rebooted in recovery mode, logged in and found to my surprise that the system now described itself as 10.10, so issue 3 was immediately resolved and could be put down to some quirkiness with the system's dpkg reporting.

Now I made a silly error, failing to check how exactly the NVDIA drivers had been affected by the upgrade (turns out the upgrade automatically installs nvidia-common and no longer prompts the user to do this, the installer also fails to check if nvidia has been manually installed and does not prompt the user for instructions around this issue!!!).

Proceeding to launch the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-195.36.31 driver from recovery console which failed miserably to report about the true state of the system, I succeeded in borking my x configuration. No problem, but since it had been a 15 hour day, I resolved to play headless for a while in total processor freedom, finding that MOCP refused to recognise the sound server, it fell to cplay to entertain for the evening.

At least I had a music player that could be trusted while my housemate struggled with the equivalent of a braai -- the South African BBQ.

A good nights rest behind me, I woke up this morning November 2, 2010 and restored the xorg.conf backup, still completely oblivious to the truth about nvidia-current and Ubuntu Maverick's new install tactics. Then my weak attempt to manually install NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.35 driver over the old driver destroyed the working xorg.conf backup.

For a brief while I remembered the terror of losing a working xorg.conf. Luckily ever since Lucid, recovery console has had the ability to generate a new xorg.conf file. Regaining sanity was a piece of cake, and I really appreciate the work taken by the community in covering this base alone.

Eventually I fired up a browser in a low-graphics mode session and discovered a posting about the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.06 driver which was in beta with many of the performance issues related to the newer versions of X fixed. While downloading it, I decided to check if the completed version of NVIDIA-Linux-x86 260.19.x was out and lo and behold, there it was. NVIDIA had released the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.12 driver addressing many issues affecting the community.

Realising my initial error, I proceeded to sudo apt-get purge nvidia* removing the nvidia-current which had been automatically installed by my system and which had failed to remove the manual install of NVIDIA-Linux-x86-195.36.31, a case of the system really not knowing much about itself -- a NVIDIA custom install is still very much a customl install -- surely the ubuntu installer should be able to take such quirkiness in its stride?

NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.12 having been installed, I fired up X from the console:

sudo gdm service start

Logged in, with sound (the sound server obviously just needed to be reset) , and found a totally awesome desktop which just needed a few minor compiz adjustments. Performance on the new kernel appears to be more than acceptable, the GUI is a lot faster than it was in Lucid with the newer NVIDIA driver, and some of the Lucid sound issues which had plagued me have disappeared, so in all I am extremely pleased with the upgrade.

All major issues, bar the NTFS problem and black space issue which I have yet to tackle, were thus resolved in little more than one-hour-and-half via recovery console after what I estimated would take at least another 5 hours of internet postings and bug-fix-hunting. A case of great progress on old hardware. Glad I upgraded from the LTS and recovery console is improving.

NOTE: I resolved the NTFS problem. Cause - an extra line in my fstab file placed there by the installer resulting in two entries for the second drive, which had to be commented out.

UPDATE: Fixing the bootsplash is easy with this link.