Four Island

As some of you may know, Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago. I was really excited because each new version of Ubuntu comes with great new features and other improvements. However, the upgrade process needs to be improved upon.

As some of you may also know, I have never undergone a peaceful Ubuntu upgrade (except for Hardy to Intrepid, and incidentally Intrepid is my favorite release of Ubuntu :P). Gutsy to Hardy failed mid-download the first time, after which the upgrade button stopped appearing in the Update Manager, so I had to download the alternative CD and upgrade using that, which actually took 8 hours and resulted in Four Island going down for a while. Intrepid to Jaunty was done in a situation without my laptop charger (which technically is my fault) which nearly resulted in my computer powering off in the middle of the upgrade (which would have been bad). And now Jaunty to Karmic is not an exception.

The first thing I did when I got home on the day Karmic was released was to boot into Ubuntu, open the Update Manager and click "Upgrade to 9.10". I was then informed that downloading the required packages would take 27 days with my internet connection. Umm.... not quite acceptable. So I switched to the wired network, after which the download halted. I was confused, so I thought of restarting the download. No. After I clicked cancel, the Upgrade button vanished from the Update Manager just as it had done in the Hardy upgrade and do-release-upgrade wasn't a help either.

So I decided to do what I had done with the Hardy upgrade and download the alternative CD. Except, for some reason, my Internet connection was wavering like crazy, so I used the torrent to download it. At the rate it was downloading, it really would have taken 27 days to download. So, for some reason, I switched to Windows and tried downloading the torrent there. Surprisingly, it completed within an hour.

I then switched back to Ubuntu, mounted the ISO as a fake CD drive and upgraded using that. I was then notified that the disc only contained 1200 of the 2052 packages I required to upgrade. What?!?!?! Why wouldn't the disc contain all of the packages if it was meant for networkless upgrade? Annoyed, I let it download the rest of the packages, but it only managed to download about 100 of them because my Internet connection was so bad.

The next day, when I was out, I used a free WiFi network to download 200 more. However, there were still 600 packages I needed. When I got home, it downloaded packages for about 8 hours. Finally, the download completed and the upgrade started, though I fell asleep before it finished.

The next thing I knew, it was 3 AM and Ubuntu was showing a message stating that the upgrade was complete and that I should restart. Internally rejoicing, I restarted the computer. I noticed the new boot splash and the new login screen. It looked a little memory-expensive to me, but I let it pass and logged in to see my beautiful new OS.

The first thing I noticed was that the mouse no longer worked. I'm seriously, the mouse wouldn't move or click. At all. I opened a terminal using my majestic keyboard skills and googled the problem. Absolutely no helpful information on it at all. And the next thing I knew, the entire screen had gone gray and was covered in spazzing "E"s. ....that wasn't good.

I restarted (I actually had to pull out the battery to get the computer to turn off) and the mouse still wouldn't work. The gray screen problem hasn't yet reappeared, but my productivity is majorly impeded by the fact that I cannot use the mouse. I deeply hope this problem will be fixed soon because I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with 9.10.

So, there's my Ubuntu upgrade experience. Not very positive. Has anyone else here done the upgrade? Post your experiences in the comments section. Bye!