pwnt.be

If you decide to upgrade your Kubuntu—or Ubuntu or any freaking buntu—edgy to feisty, you should prepare for some unforeseen circumstances. But don’t worry, I’m here to help you foresee.
First off, I’m all for streamlining the update process, and it’s nice of them to create a graphical upgrade tool, but it wasn’t very helpful. I followed the instructions to the point where the upgrade progress dialog was supposed to show up, and … Well, CPU usage spiked for a couple of minutes, because of a Python script that was running, but nothing came up. I killed it, hoping my system wasn’t messed up already, and, luckily, everything was still fine. I then proceeded to use the old—and now, sadly, undocumented—upgrade method: replace every occurrence of edgy in /etc/apt/sources.list with feisty and ran apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and apt-get -f install. To make matters worse, Apache 2 caused some dependency problems, so I temporarily uninstalled it. Other than that, everything downloaded and installed pretty smoothly, apart from mdadm nagging about the absence of RAID arrays over and over; I ignored the warnings, as my notebook only has a PATA hard drive. The SCSI subsystem seems somewhat broken though.
I then proceeded to reboot my system. Lo and behold, it didn’t work. Apparently, they decided to quietly move to a more rigorous device naming scheme for HAL, and /etc/fstab wasn’t updated properly. The result? My /usr/lib and /usr/share device names didn’t exist and the—now non-verbose!—boot process failed with a bunch of errors, kicking me to the “emergency shell”. Granted, that allowed me to investigate the problem. A quick look inside /dev/disk/by-uuid helped me repair fstab and I was back on track.
The first thing I noticed when KDM had started up was the new theme, called “Polyester”. I don’t like it. The contrast on widgets is too high and I don’t care for the fade effects at all. Hence, after logging in, I switched back to my preferred “Plastik” (with the “Lipstik Standard” color theme) and also updated KDM’s settings to make it use the same style.
The next problem at hand was the realization that NetworkManager, or at least the version of KNetworkManager that ships with Feisty, isn’t as useful as its developers are ambitious. There’s no support for WPA and it never tells you what it’s doing. Since I use WPA2, I didn’t bother to look into it any further and uninstalled it. The old method where you just edit /etc/network/interfaces still works, and, actually, I’m under the impression that associating with my access point happens a lot faster now. One thing I did have to do was remove the wpa-conf managed the file had. I think I copied it from that forum thread, but it turned out to be both incorrect and superfluous.
Other than that, Feisty isn’t much of a shocker. The main reason why I upgraded is so I could keep using recent packages. There are a couple of visual improvements and my system seems slightly more responsive, but it doesn’t strike me as much of an upgrade. Judging by the problems I just described, I still think the predictable release cycle isn’t worth much. It’s proactive nonsense. If your product isn’t ready, you postpone it. Windows Vista isn’t the best example, but at least they had the courage to admit their goals were further away than they thought, rather than deciding to drop everything just so they could release within a timeframe they set ages ago. Just my two cents, obviously.
If you do decide to get Feisty, once you’ve ironed out the kinks, you’ll end up with a stable and nice Linux-based desktop operating system. Unfortunately, as with any Linux distribution, those very kinks are no doubt still plentiful.