Is the Karmic Release Ubuntu’s Vista?

Posted by Martin R on December 30, 2009
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After six or seven weeks of Windows, I’ve finally gotten Ubuntu linux to run again. My installation crashed when I tried to upgrade on-line to the most recent version, Karmic. And then I couldn’t boot Karmic from a USB stick. I thought the copy on the stick had gone corrupt. Yesterday Tor lent me a CD burner, and I found that Karmic simply won’t boot on my netbook. It crashes midway through bootup in the same way regardless if I try a USB stick or a CD. So I downloaded the previous version, Jaunty, and it installed just fine.

Is the Karmic release Ubuntu’s Vista? Is it a dud release, like the second-to-last Windows version? I can’t tell, because it won’t even install on my vanilla 2008 netbook.

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Comments

  1. #1 andy
    December 30, 2009

    I’ve heard there have been more problems than usual with Karmic, though personally Xubuntu Karmic is working fine for me (then again I’m using a desktop PC)

  2. #2 Indian Art
    December 30, 2009

    Sorry to hear that Martin.

    I had some trouble too upgrading on my Desktop from Jaunty to Karmic even though I am not sure if it was the power outage I suffered twice during upgrade & installation was responsible (instead of Karmic).

    I did not have any problem upgrading it on my Acer Laptop Aspire 5920. Both the Laptop & Desktops have been upgraded on a ‘dual booted’ system.

    I can say it was definitely worth the teething problems my Desktop PC had during the upgrade. Karmic has been faster to boot. It new theme & some automatically changing wallpapers are classy. My laptop connects better & faster to wireless networks on Karmic.

  3. #3 Hans Persson
    December 30, 2009

    It works without problems for me on four different machines (with different hardware; two laptops and two desktops), all of them upgraded.

  4. #4 Daniel T Chen
    December 30, 2009

    A number of pretty significant changes to the entire software stack are in each Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) release. For 9.10, we’re looking at a fairly upending Linux, udev/hal, etc.

    For non-netbook remix, was this installation from the desktop image or the alternate image?

  5. #5 dveej
    December 30, 2009

    My Karmic experience is great. I totally wiped Vista – not even allowing it on a partition, as I did before. Karmic does everything Vista did except faster.
    Did you search ubuntuforums for netbook problems/solutions?

  6. #6 Martin R
    December 30, 2009

    was this installation from the desktop image or the alternate image?

    It was the standard vanilla image.

    Did you search ubuntuforums for netbook problems/solutions?

    No, though I usually do take my Ubuntu problems to the forum. The Karmic boot crash was just so definitive, and there were no parameters I could tweak to avoid it.

  7. #7 Greg Laden
    December 30, 2009

    I think suggesting that Karmic is Vista is absurd because Vista was fundamentally broken in every possible way and is a proprietary operating system. Most people are not having these problems with Karmic

    But I understand you frustration.

    Perhaps you should stick with the long term releases, of which Karmic is not one.

  8. #8 george.w
    December 30, 2009

    Sorry you had troubles – seven weeks of Windows! Brr.

    My new refurb ACER laptop showed up last week with Vista on it, quickly wiped and now dual-boot Ubuntu Karmic/Win7. At the same time I installed Karmic on my desktop machine, which had a video driver problem and ran horribly until I enabled the proprietary nVidia driver. Now, it’s OK, but so far I’m not seeing how it’s better than the previous version.

    But I didn’t try the on-line upgrade; that just made my Spidey-sense tingle. My /home is on a separate partition, so I downloaded the new version, burned a CD, and blew away the / partition for a shiny new install. Twenty minutes later (on my desktop) I had all my bookmarks and everything back. These I copied to my laptop.

    If this one didn’t run, I’d have just gone back to Jaunty like you did. Jaunty is supported until Oct 2010 I think, so another release will come along before it is retired.

  9. #9 spaghettimonster
    December 30, 2009

    When in doubt, disable acpi during boot by going to edit mode in the menu and adding “acpi=off” at the end of the boot command. The boot command looks something like this:

    linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14 root=UUID=f064b421-f5c8-156f-27aa-491dfe6ce144 ro single

    Hope that helps.

  10. #10 Martin R
    December 30, 2009

    Before burning the ISO file to the CD?

  11. #11 spaghettimonster
    December 30, 2009

    No, after that. When you are booting the CD for the first time.

  12. #12 Brian X
    December 30, 2009

    I’ve played a bit with Karmic. My number one beef is that they’re obviously not paying much attention to the Intel Mac market, because trying to boot a live CD on my MacBook required a bit of tweaking and still didn’t really work right.

    That said, I have a feeling they’d be well-served to put off Lucid Lynx for a while — I haven’t heard a whole lot about Karmic, but what little I have heard has not been positive. I did download a copy almost as soon as it came out, but I haven’t done much of anything with it, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to.

  13. #13 Martin R
    December 30, 2009

    No, after that. When you are booting the CD for the first time.

    Where does the file I should edit reside if not on the CD?

  14. #14 spaghettimonster
    December 30, 2009

    More info on changing boot parameters:

    http://grumpymole.blogspot.com/2007/05/ubuntu-how-to-edit-grub-boot-parameters.html

  15. #15 spaghettimonster
    December 30, 2009

    You would not be editing a file in the CD, but changing boot parameters temporarily in the grub boot menu just for booting this once. And then, if it works, you can change it later permanently, when you install Karmic on your disk.

  16. #16 Daniel T Chen
    December 30, 2009

    You might want to give the alternate (text-based) installer a whirl.

  17. #17 Martin R
    December 30, 2009

    Spag monster, when you boot Ubuntu from an installation CD, it doesn’t run GRUB. There are no parameters to edit. And on my machine, Karmic reliably and uniformly crashes during that CD boot sequence.

  18. #18 HJ Hornbeck
    December 30, 2009

    There is a way to tweak the parameters when you boot from CD. I think it’s F6 when you get the “What would you like to do?” screen….

    Yep! That’s it: Changing the Boot Option Configuration Line

  19. #19 HJ Hornbeck
    December 30, 2009

    (for the record: I’m not as happy with Karmic as I was with Jaunty, but that’s mostly ATI’s fault; their 3D drivers no longer support the video card on my laptop, even though it’s only a few months old…)

  20. #20 Colby Kinser
    December 30, 2009

    I have installed 9.10 on 4 different systems, one of them a UNR distro, and another in a VM on a Vista host. In every case, no problems. Works better than 9.04 in every way. I’ve heard many horror stories, but didn’t experience any of them. The *only* problem I had was on a system that I installed a 9.10 Beta and then tried to “upgrade” to a gold release, but I discount that due to the Beta nature of the original install.

    With Dropbox or Ubuntu One, then it becomes even easier to just do a complete reinstall, which seems to resolve some of the problems I’ve heard about. Just reinstall, reconnect to your DB/UO storage, and then back in business – just the pain of reinstalling your apps, which is usually not that hard.

    I do hope that the upgrade path to 10.04 will be less prone to error.

  21. #21 Lassi Hippeläinen
    December 31, 2009

    Just FYI: it seems that issues of 9.10 not booting are not the fault of Linux. They can be traced to the new boot loader, GRUB2. There’s no doubt that a new version is needed, since the original GRUB is from 1996! (In those days people were running Windows 95 or Red Hat 3…) But leaping over 13 years of industry change is bound to lead into problems.

  22. #22 LCC
    December 31, 2009

    I initially had the issue too, but switched to the AMD64 & things went smoothly on both my new laptop & my old one. The ACPI trick was necessary for my 4 year old laptop.

  23. #23 Nomen Nescio
    December 31, 2009

    i’m still holding out for the next Ubuntu LTS before i upgrade. the six-month release cycle may be good for getting stuff updated, but it’s too much bother for me to keep up with on machines i want to use for actual work; the three-plus year support cycle of the LTSes are more my style. so i’m on 8.04 until it’s no longer the newest LTS.

  24. #24 Orion
    December 31, 2009

    No way that 9.10 is like Vista.

    I had no problems with install with 9.10 but had network sharing and Internet load-time problems, and went back to Jaunty. I’ve re-installed Karmic on 2 of my machines, both working fine.

    Recently, I had problems encoding video in Jaunty using x264, possibly because of upgrades, but with 9.10 there are no problems, so I’m considering upgrading my other two machines to 9.10.

    Let’s hope with Shuttleworth concentrating more on Ubuntu, bugs will be less in future. I’m ok with the 6-month version release cycle. In the longer run, it may prove even more beneficial. Besides, we always have the option to skip releases — not like MS trying to impose new, backwardly-incompatible standards to force users to dish out their dollars.

    This 6-month release cycle is pushing others to develop somewhat faster too. So, the many Linux distros stand to gain. Even Windows has been pushed to develop faster otherwise MS might still be happily selling Win 2000 or Win 98.

  25. #25 Jeff
    January 1, 2010

    Karmic has been a video-bugmonster for me. I still cannot hibernate or suspend my dell vostro 1000 laptop, which is often a real pain, and I could not even get video to work on the liveCD on my dell vostro 200 desktop. I reverted both my desktop and my fiance’s laptop and my desktop to 9.04.

    8.10 was good, 9.04 is good 9.10 failed for me.

    Now, if this is Ubuntu’s Vista, maybe 10.04 will be Ubuntu’s Win7? We can hope!

  26. #26 leo
    January 4, 2010

    Karmic has been a big problem for me. The upgrade route left me without a network and left the OS generally very flaky, with a lot of library version mismatches etc. Eventually, I had to clean-install from CD. Same at home with my daughter’s machine.

    The advantages over Jaunty seem elusive. Other than the odd aesthetic change I don’t think it is either quicker or better. My main reason for upgrading was UbuntuOne. I just can’t get it to work, though. I’m still without network and printing.

  27. #27 Raissa
    January 11, 2010

    The best with karmic is to do a fresh install. Everything just works better than if you do an upgrade. I also thought that jaunty was better than karmic. So I tried going back and realised I was wrong!

  28. #28 Martin R
    January 11, 2010

    The best with karmic is to do a fresh install.

    Except, you know, that the installation program crashes on my computer when run off a pristine CD.

  29. #29 Nomen Nescio
    January 11, 2010

    FWIW, i very recently (since my previous comment) did an install of 9.04 on an Asus netbook, then an online upgrade from that to 9.10 karmic.

    on that one machine (EeePC 1005HAB), karmic works much better than its immediate predecessor. both installs are/were of the netbook remix, not “plain” ubuntu. neither install was entirely trouble free, although with karmic that was partly because i insisted on an odd nonstandard configuration with most of the disk strongly encrypted; the standard installer isn’t meant to let you do that. i’m an advanced geek, though, and never satisfied with the defaults.

    i installed 9.04 first because it was available (in the netbook remix version) as a USB-flashdisk image. karmic’s netbook remix was only available as an ISO CD-ROM image, and netbooks… well… don’t have CD-ROM drives. i don’t know what canonical was thinking when they made that oversight, honestly.

    9.04 failed to recognize any of the network hardware in the machine, but otherwise ran; with a lot of advanced geekery i got the wired network to function. i immediately upgraded to karmic, which allowed most all of the hardware to work right out of the box. i’m happy with it so far, and will try to remember this thread for any complaints i may develop later on.

  30. #30 Brady
    January 17, 2010

    I’ve only gotten to 2 grips now about karmic. I was using fiesty fawn, but just couldn’t install software anymore. Frist the cd wouldn’t boot, just grub, then got the laptop remix and got through install, to find that samba wouldn’t work.

  31. #31 Nomen Nescio
    January 17, 2010

    samba actually worked pretty well on the 9.10 netbook remix, for me. well… when i tried to copy over multiple files of 300-plus MB each using that, it did choke on me. but that may have been because the samba on the other end (an, ahem, oddly configured 8.04) is old and might be iffy.

    i should’ve used scp/sftp, i know. i just got lazy and wanted to drag-n-drop. ended up using a flash disk for that copy.