My upgrade to Gusty Gibbon (Kubuntu) was a staggering failure to start with. First had some repository fetch failures (my fault for not tidying up Apt’s sources list). Then had a couple of errors extracting (or dl’ing… I forget now) some packages, followed by an error “Modifying software channels” which seemed unrecoverable (i.e. it would interminably hang at that point). Reboot, try again, same problem.

In the end I gave up and downloaded the upgrade CD, burnt it and tried with that, only to experience at least one of the problems again. All seemed lost until I specified -not- to download updates during the upgrade and everything seemed to work swimmingly after that.

Still. Hardly a stunning endorsement for the user-friendliness of Linux… but at least it worked in the end.

Years ago, when I first moved to using Linux full-time, I think I made a colleague’s life fairly miserable with technical questions, in order to get my environment working properly. Well… if not miserable, then certainly challenging. (Thanks Stu!)

It’s good to know that karma works in the Linux world, because I’m now getting similar helpdesk-type questions, in turn, from a colleague at the company I’m currently contracting at. In a roundabout way, I get to return the favour.

Although, thanks to K/Ubuntu, I still have a massive deficit, since the answers are nowhere near as complicated as it was back when we were using Red Hat/Mandrake and then Gentoo… >:-)

First mentioned here, my Feisty instability problems haven’t abated. The frequency has decreased to be replaced with less recoverable issues.

Today I experienced something that appeared to be suspiciously similar to this problem (missing window frames, which makes things surprisingly unuseable), but couldn’t google a solution. In the end, I removed my .kde directory (and .kderc file), restarted and things started to look a little better. The only negative was the need to reconfigure all my kde settings.

Not particularly impressed with Kubuntu Feisty so far.

After one and a half days of use:

• one major – unrecoverable – crash in X (i.e. couldn’t even get to the console using CTRL+ALT+F[n])
• Playing with “Monitor & Display” setup in System Settings resulted in an un-useable X configuration — okay not actually Feisty’s fault, but I’m disappointed it still doesn’t work in this release — thank god for a backed up, working xorg.conf.
• OpenOffice, usplash, skype and a couple of other apps that temporarily escape my memory, have all crashed at one point during the day

So initial experience is indicating stability is significantly worse than Edgy. It’ll be interesting to see if it improves over the next few weeks/months…

I made the big mistake of “hibernating” my Kubuntu laptop.

Didn’t notice any problems (well, other than the fact that it completely failed to work and spewed out error messages all over the place), but today the performance seemed groaningly bad. I didn’t put 2-and-2 together at that point, and played with a bunch of different options to try to figure out why things seemed markedly slower than usual.

Mid afternoon, and things went bad to worse. A couple of crashes.

I -never- have crashes…

That’s for Windows people!

Finally the laptop wouldn’t start up at all. Got part-way into the boot process before falling over in a quivering heap.

Tried booting with the Kubuntu Live CD — even that crashed.

Which really got me worried: Visions of catastrophic hardware failures. Flaming CPU’s in the distance. Motherboards weeping over broken RAM modules.

A bit of investigation finally uncovered swap as the probably cause of the problem. This bug report was very helpful. I think the Live CD failure was unrelated (possibly media failure).

A recovery mode boot managed to get me to a prompt where I could try to reformat (mkswap) and remount (swapon -va) swap. Rather than using UUID, I changed fstab to use the device (/dev/hda2) instead, as suggested here. That seemed to briefly fix the problem — but only briefly. Shortly afterwards, another crash.

For a few moments, entertained the thought of casting borked laptop off the top of the building. Feel deep sympathy for the guy in that video which went round in the late 90′s — the one who attacked his computer with the keyboard…

Brainwave while walking home from work. Boot with Knoppix (thank [your-deity-here] for Knoppix). Wiped swap clean with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda2 (where /dev/hda2 is my swap partition), then reformated using mkswap. Rebooted, and things seem to be back to normal.

I don’t know why mkswap on its own didn’t fix the problem, but it appears a full wipe has made the difference.

What a waste of an afternoon.