You might have read my earlier post about (the pain of) upgrading/fresh install from Dapper to Edgy beta and Edgy release candidate in my laptop. I wanted to do a fresh install of Edgy after it was officially released. I downloaded the install CD from Ubuntu download site. I wanted to boot with the live CD to make sure it’s working because the beta and release candidate live CDs didn’t work. I booted with the Edgy live CD and to my surprise it booted fine.
My laptop is a dual boot laptop (Windows XP and Dapper/Edgy beta). I wanted to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop before I upgrade to Edgy since it has accumulated lots of junk, typical for a Windows machine plus I wanted to resize the hard drive partitions. I went ahead and deleted all the partitions and reformatted the hard drive. I then repartitioned my hard drive and installed Windows XP. Once XP installation was done, I wanted to start the Edgy installation. I inserted the Edgy live CD and booted the laptop. To my surprise and horror, the live CD showed distorted screen similar to beta and release candidate live CDs. The live CD booted fine when Edgy was already installed in the laptop. With installed Edgy gone, the live CD was showing a distorted X screen. I couldn’t use that CD to install the system.
I then had to download the alternate install CD which has an option to install in text mode (old non graphical installer). To download alternate CD image, you have to select other installation option in the download mirror sites. Once installed, the installation failed to start the X server as happened before (ATI X1600 mobility radeon card). I tried method 1 in the ATI driver installation guide for Edgy. I rebooted my system and X server didn’t start. I rebooted into recovery mode and then reconfigured my X server using dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. I went with the default selections. After the reconfiguration was done and the changes were written to xorg.conf file, I redid the ATI driver installation. Once that was done, I rebooted and Voila!!! the system started fine. I had to waste almost one full day trying to do the upgrade. Upgrade from Hoary to Dapper was much more faster and smoother.
Several people have complained in Ubuntu forums, Slashdot and other places regarding the issues/problems they encountered while upgrading from Dapper to Edgy. There are couple of blogs (eg: blog1, blog2) blaming Automatix and other issues for upgrade problems. That might be true for some upgrades, but not for all. My fresh install and upgrade options were without any of those that were mentioned in those blogs. My upgrade attempt was from the fresh install of Dapper. Both the upgrade and fresh install failed. It never happened with Dapper or Hoary. Edgy is more buggier than any other Ubuntu release. It’s more like bleeding with pain rather than bleeding edge.
This site has some common upgrade problems and possible solutions for those problems. Give it a try if you encounter any problem while upgrading.
That might be true for some upgrades, but not for all.
Thanks for the tip JojaCoder. I’ll try that next time when it happens.
The solution of “the live CD was showing a distorted X screen” was, for me, as simple as editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use a different resolution. 1280×1024 worked fine.
I got to shell using Ctrl+Alt+F1, then used ‘vi’ to edit the file and switched back to X again using Ctrl+Alt+F7. After that restart X using Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and the Live CD runs fine.
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