Ubuntu 8.04 Woes

yesterday’s post shows that getting there wasn’t as good as it could have been.) Well, the Ubuntu Folks (see link to the left there) released the new version of their OS last week, and I just had to upgrade. To be honest, I’ve been mirroring this newest branch for the last month and a half, since they put out the 8.04 RC (release candidate). I initially upgraded two weeks ago, a few days before the final release. The upgrade went well, but there were some bugs with policykit that left me unable to actually do any administration on my own system. <sigh> So I did a full reinstall, back to 7.10. Since then, I’ve had a few issues with the system, mostly audio system related – mixer issues causing my sound to be very quiet. Well, last week, a day or two after the 8.04 release, I finally upgraded. I downloaded both the 32- and 64-bit versions, and installed the 64-bit on my machine. I’ve been running 7.10 64-bit and it had been pretty good for me (up ’till I tried to upgrade at least). I got everything working, for the most part. Sound was still a bit soft, and Flash was doing weird things. (Flash has always been iffy under linux, and even worse under 64-bit linux.) Well, a day or so later, flash stopped working altogether. I decided that since flash worked well under 32-bit, that I’d install the 32-bit version. This opened up a whole new slew of problems – the most annoying is that the machine failed to actually *reboot* correctly. I could shut down fully (from the command line), but not reboot. At all. After much fussing and a few reinstalls, I gave up and went back to 7.10 32-bit. The next big idea I had was to install a himem kernel, one that would support more that 4gb of RAM. Yeah, I worked on it for several hours before finally giving up. I actually started trying this under Hardy Heron (8.04), but when I met with dead ends, I went back to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). I’ve since given up on that project. It’s only caused me grief, frustration, and tears. I decided yesterday that I will not be deploying Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on new-hire machines any time soon. I’ll wait a month or so before trying to upgrade my computer again, and if my machine works fine at that time, I’ll start rolling out the new release to new hires. To the Ubuntu folks: I love your product, but please fix the bugs! OMG fix the bugs! You came close to losing me as an Ubuntu user yesterday. That’s all for now. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>

4 thoughts on “Ubuntu 8.04 Woes”

  1. For the soft sound..I think I recall reading they switched to some new sound server for 8.04.
    For me, I couldn’t even get it installed. I have a HW SATA RAID on my HP system at work. Fedora Core, CentOS, RHEL, etc see it fine. But for some reason Ubuntu would see two individual drives, ignoring the controller. Go fig. Though in my case I gave up and went back to Vista 64 😉

  2. Yeah, you’re just a Vista whore. 😉 (but I loves you anyway *hug*)
    I actually have a copy of Vista, but I’m not putting it on that box – I have actual home dir stuff I need to keep… And all my music is on there too. I don’t have any desire to run Vista on that box.
    Meh, I dunno. I’m guessing the kinks will work themselves out over the next few weeks or so… or the Ubuntu folks will find themselves as not the most popular distro…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *