Ubuntu 8.10 anyone?

[just brew it!]

Decided to check it out today, and hit a snag right out of the gate. I can't seem to get it to permanently use a static IP configuration (instead of DHCP). Apparently they've completely revamped how network settings are handled, and unless I'm missing something, what they've done is just plain retarded. The system doesn't use /etc/network/interfaces the way it used to, and the new GUI-based network settings app is wonky.

Did a bunch of Googling, and eventually tried the procedure outlined here (scroll down about 3/4 of the way to the "More about the Network Manager" section), and it sort of works... but only until the next reboot. Blecchh.

I guess I'll have to figure out how to disable whatever new voodoo it is they've implemented, so that I can just configure things manually in /etc/network/interfaces (the old fashioned way).

I really want to like this new release, since it supposedly rolls out some nifty new features. But if the network configuration snafu is any indication, I'll be sticking with the 8.04 LTS release for a while yet.

[bitvector]

I guess I'll have to figure out how to disable whatever new voodoo it is they've implemented, so that I can just configure things manually in /etc/network/interfaces (the old fashioned way).

The Debian way.

Have you tried using update-rc.d or /etc/defaults to disable Network Manager altogether so it won't molest your /etc/network config?

BTW: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/256054

[axeman]

The new network manager is a bit of a mess. It was much worse a month ago. Problem is, when the whole distro is updated to use the newest upstream versions of pretty much everything, it's not pretty. I'm using it on my laptop with only a few caveats, but I have to say I'm not impressed. Given the relatively current nature of most of the packages in 8.04, I really wish they would have pushed it back a month or so - although the six month release schedule is admirable, it's just not going to result in the best product all of the time. 8.10 feels a little bit like using Debian Testing - okay if you're relatively savvy, but not really ready for prime-time. As long as the major things keep getting backported to 8.04 like Firefox and OO.org, I don't think skipping 8.10 is going to result in missing much. It's only been a few weeks since they figured out how to get wireless passwords to start saving again, I wouldn't hold my breath on the static IP thing. Did I mention my keyboard stops working if I change my screen brightness? Nice new feature, guys.

[just brew it!]

I guess I'll have to figure out how to disable whatever new voodoo it is they've implemented, so that I can just configure things manually in /etc/network/interfaces (the old fashioned way).

The Debian way.

Yeah, rub it in why dontcha...

I work with a Debian evangelist; he's already got me (mostly) weaned off of Fedora. Baby steps...

[bitvector]

8.10 feels a little bit like using Debian Testing - okay if you're relatively savvy, but not really ready for prime-time.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. As a seven year user of debian testing, I'd demand you take that back. The magnitude of radical half-baked changes imposed in Ubuntu for the sake of novelty and "cutting edge features" is way way greater than Debian testing. The further Ubuntu diverges from Debian upstream, the more they're getting to be like Fedora -- always shipping broken stuff because they're trying to move just a little too fast into new functionality.

[just brew it!]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. As a seven year user of debian testing, I'd demand you take that back. The magnitude of radical half-baked changes imposed in Ubuntu for the sake of novelty and "cutting edge features" is way way greater than Debian testing. The further Ubuntu diverges from Debian upstream, the more they're getting to be like Fedora -- always shipping broken stuff because they're trying to move just a little too fast into new functionality.

Heh.

OK, I guess I'm sticking with 8.04, at least for systems I care about... and maybe enabling the backports repository. (Have any feel for how risky enabling backports is?)

[axeman]

8.10 feels a little bit like using Debian Testing - okay if you're relatively savvy, but not really ready for prime-time.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. As a seven year user of debian testing, I'd demand you take that back. The magnitude of radical half-baked changes imposed in Ubuntu for the sake of novelty and "cutting edge features" is way way greater than Debian testing. The further Ubuntu diverges from Debian upstream, the more they're getting to be like Fedora -- always shipping broken stuff because they're trying to move just a little too fast into new functionality.

I would say pushing gcc 4.3 into testing causing me to be constantly pointing the gcc symlink back to 4.1 everytime I update so I could compile kernel modules again is pretty half baked. But then again, maybe I'm just being picky and should have just ignored it for the past 8 months. I haven't found Ubuntu to be nearly as broken as Fedora. Sure they are a little bleeding edge, but they have a big enough community to keep things (mostly) working. Then again, I'm still having a headache with Samba on every other 8.04 machine I've touched and I've NEVER had that problem with Debian. At least 8.10 fixed that for me.

[bitvector]

I would say pushing gcc 4.3 into testing causing me to be constantly pointing the gcc symlink back to 4.1 everytime I update so I could compile kernel modules again is pretty half baked. But then again, maybe I'm just being picky and should have just ignored it for the past 8 months.

What modules were you compiling manually? If you were using module-assistant, a Debian approved kernel module compilation mechanism, it would have handled all of that properly and automatically.

[just brew it!]

I haven't found Ubuntu to be nearly as broken as Fedora.

Based on the 8.04 LTS Ubuntu release, I would agree. Jury's still out on 8.10.

Sure they are a little bleeding edge, but they have a big enough community to keep things (mostly) working. Then again, I'm still having a headache with Samba on every other 8.04 machine I've touched and I've NEVER had that problem with Debian. At least 8.10 fixed that for me.

I haven't noticed any Samba issues on 8.04 so far. But my use case may be different from yours...

[axeman]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. As a seven year user of debian testing, I'd demand you take that back. The magnitude of radical half-baked changes imposed in Ubuntu for the sake of novelty and "cutting edge features" is way way greater than Debian testing. The further Ubuntu diverges from Debian upstream, the more they're getting to be like Fedora -- always shipping broken stuff because they're trying to move just a little too fast into new functionality.

Heh.

OK, I guess I'm sticking with 8.04, at least for systems I care about... and maybe enabling the backports repository. (Have any feel for how risky enabling backports is?)

You can always look through here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy-backports/

Personally, I don't see any point to it. The few packages that I feel I want to be up to date upon, I'm just doing manual installs. Some developers even give you .debs for their apps already compiled for old distros.

[axeman]

I would say pushing gcc 4.3 into testing causing me to be constantly pointing the gcc symlink back to 4.1 everytime I update so I could compile kernel modules again is pretty half baked. But then again, maybe I'm just being picky and should have just ignored it for the past 8 months.

What modules were you compiling manually? If you were using module-assistant, a Debian approved kernel module compilation mechanism, it would have handled all of that properly and automatically.

VMWare. I've done the module-assistant thing for nvidia, but I'm super rusty on Debian so I don't even remember how. Also compiling recent versions of ntfs-3g, since most distros are woefully behind on updating this, including Ubuntu. There might be something else as well, but that's off the top of my head.

[axeman]

I haven't found Ubuntu to be nearly as broken as Fedora.

Based on the 8.04 LTS Ubuntu release, I would agree. Jury's still out on 8.10.

Sure they are a little bleeding edge, but they have a big enough community to keep things (mostly) working. Then again, I'm still having a headache with Samba on every other 8.04 machine I've touched and I've NEVER had that problem with Debian. At least 8.10 fixed that for me.

I haven't noticed any Samba issues on 8.04 so far. But my use case may be different from yours...

My issue was browsing Samba shares with Nautilus. There are numerous issues related to the move from vfs2 to gvfs. Funny thing is, I can have two machines configured more or less identically and only one will have issue. Downgrading to the packages from 7.10 fixed it 100% but locking package versions, etc, is a huge pain in the butt. My one machine left with 8.04 is fine, so, meh.

[just brew it!]

What modules were you compiling manually? If you were using module-assistant, a Debian approved kernel module compilation mechanism, it would have handled all of that properly and automatically.

VMWare.

Double-yuck. In my experience, getting VMware kernel modules to build cleanly on distros they don't explicitly support is a train wreck more often than not. It's one of the reasons I preferentially use VirtualBox these days, as long as I don't need any of the features VMware provides that aren't available in VirtualBox.

[bitvector]

VMWare.

WRT vmware on Debian, you should definitely check out vmware-package. A friend of mine is a maintainer for it and it really makes it much more Debian-style in the layout, packaging and module compilation. It takes the input vmware tarballs (for player, server, workstation, etc.) and makes modular .deb packages out of them. It can take the any-any updates or kernel modules from the releases and make module-assistant compatible source packages. I've been using it for a long time and it makes it all quite painless. I just do m-a a-i vmware-any-any-kernel-source and, boom, the modules are compiled, bundled into a module deb, installed, and good to go. The only snags I've run into is vmware's fault: periods where the any-any updates and vmware support aren't actually keeping up with newer kernel compatibility.

Also compiling recent versions of ntfs-3g, since most distros are woefully behind on updating this, including Ubuntu.

I agree with that. I've been using ntfs-3g from Debian experimental, though, and find it's pretty recent. The current one is about a month behind (using the Sept. 1.2918 release rather than the release 1.5012 of a couple weeks ago) and gets pretty quick updates.

[notfred]

I ended up ripping network manager out of my desktop box entirely. The regression in VPN functionality where it no longer allows saving of the group password without saving the user password is daft. I was also having fun with NFS mounts of my web server files which it blocked on during startup as if it sees mounts in the /var filesystem it waits for those at boot, but those are before the network mangler gets up and running on the interfaces and had to hack startup files to avoid the wait.

[henry44]

I tried 8.10 (both 32 and 64 bit versions) on a Lenovo x200 and had to go get video, NIC and wireless drivers. The sound I could never get working. Since this laptop is basically my PDA, cell phone and mp3 player, the sound issue is a deal breaker.

The other issue is battery power management. With the factory 64-bit Vista, I was seeing about 6.5 hours (9-cell battery) with usual usage. With 8.10, I was seeing about 4.5 hours with same usage. With XP-pro, 8.5-10 hours of battery life. Although I'd like to ditch XP and go Linux (64-bit so I can see the full 4 gb of ram), the battery life and sound are stopping me.

I have 8.10 (upgrade from 8.04) installed on an older Averatec 1150-EH1 small laptop. Every piece of hardware was picked up during install and worked the first time. Battery life is actually about 10% longer, getting almost 3 hours from a full charge. Both laptops support cpu throttling and display dimming.

This laptop runs cooler and more stable with Ubuntu than with the original XP Pro install.

[just brew it!]

henry44 -- sounds like a textbook case of YMMV!

[bitvector]

I tried 8.10 (both 32 and 64 bit versions) on a Lenovo x200 and had to go get video, NIC and wireless drivers. The sound I could never get working. Since this laptop is basically my PDA, cell phone and mp3 player, the sound issue is a deal breaker.

Have you found the ThinkWiki yet? It's specifically for Linux on ThinkPads and they usually have the best info for tricky hardware support on specific models.

The battery life issues will also improve with time as the ACPI rules are tweaked, but you should check out PowerTOP. It's a little tool and when you run it, it estimates the dynamic power usage so you can see what is causing a lot of the drain. Then after tweaking, you can see if you've improved things. It'll even give tips. Sometimes you can't do much about some of the drain issues (i.e. newer USB chipset with less mature drivers that don't have all of the power features, etc.), but it's worth a shot.

[srg86]

My expereince with it has been mostly positive, though with a few niggles.

I've had to ditch my M-Audio sound card as it simply won't work with 8.10. It is detected, but when I try to get any sound out of it, I just get errors. I've gone back to my onboard AC97 audio and all is fine. PulseAudio is much better in 8.10 and I haven't had to revert to alsa as I had to in 8.04. Also on my main machine, with 8.10 hibernate finally works! yay!! I also fine Gnome in this release more productive and easier.

I've not had the IP issue as I use DHCP. On my laptop, the VGA port simply doesn't work, neither does the TV out. I can't get it to detect and use any attached displays. Hibernate crashes on startup (still that's even better than with 8.04 and previouse). My USB wireless dongle doesn't work with Linux all together. Not a show stopper as I normally run that machine on XP anyway.

All in all I have personally found 8.10 to be the overall most polished version of Ubuntu so far. I just wish simple point and click multiple monitor support worked, though that could be because of the basic driver for my laptop, which is quite old (ATI Rage Mobility M1, which is Rage II based).

BTW I know how you feel about VMWare, I got fed up with fighting with compiling the kernel modules so I'm using VirtualBox as well. Much easier.

On my old K6-2 machine, 8.10 finally properly detects the Voodoo 3 and runs it higher than 800x600. Also, one thing I don't get, Ubuntu boots fine (but slowly of course) on the Cyrix 6x86 but Debian Etch hangs as soon as the kernel starts.

[notfred]

Also, one thing I don't get, Ubuntu boots fine (but slowly of course) on the Cyrix 6x86 but Debian Etch hangs as soon as the kernel starts.

Probably assumptions about exactly which instructions are supported by non-mainstream processors and Debian Etch is getting it wrong whilst Ubuntu 8.10 is either actually reading the cpuflags correctly or guessing it right. It always used to be a problem with the Via EPIA boards so I can easily believe a Cyrix 6x86 having problems.

[srg86]

Probably assumptions about exactly which instructions are supported by non-mainstream processors and Debian Etch is getting it wrong whilst Ubuntu 8.10 is either actually reading the cpuflags correctly or guessing it right. It always used to be a problem with the Via EPIA boards so I can easily believe a Cyrix 6x86 having problems.

Yeah that must be it, it seems odd that that Etch gives the impression that it only needs a 486 CPU. But the trouble is that with CPUID turned on, the 6x86 reports its self as a 586, even though it only supports a 486 instruction set. Etch still crashes with CPUID turned off though. The VIA C3 problem is also found in the 6x86MX. Both these processors have 586 instruction sets, though report themselves as 686s.

[just brew it!]

Well, I deinstalled the network manager packages, manually edited my interfaces and resolv.conf, and 8.10 seems to be (mostly) behaving itself now. Still not planning on using it as my primary desktop (I'm currently test driving it in a VM).