Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope
Last week decided to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version 9.04, aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Although I knew from the start that there was nothing really groundbreaking in this new release, I upgraded in order to be prepared for the next release due out this October. I have read a couple of articles, here and here. The first one seems to be all worked up about about aesthetics saying Ubuntu is “now as slick and as beautiful as Mac OSX or Windows 7″. The second article seem to be more impressed with how fast 9.04 boots up and shuts down.
A quick search through Google and I find more articles talking about how slick the new release is or how fast it starts up and shuts down. If these articles are anything to go by, then the developers have clearly met one of the goals set by their BDFL, Mark Shuttleworth: Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. But I fear that the developers have focused on these goals too much that they lost focus on two of the most important things for (most) end users: system stability and seamless upgrades.
I have been using Ubuntu since the very first release (Ubuntu 4.10) and I have used every single release since then. I use my computer for 8 hours a day at the very least. I have several projects that I maintain and file system integrity is very, very important for me. System stability is something that I expect from a “stable” release. Almost all of the Ubuntu releases so far have been very stable. The 8.04LTS release had a few issues with Flash crashing under 64-bit Firefox and Wi-Fi would die abruptly and get back up again but that’s about it. The 8.10 release had a very annoying kernel bug that took 5 months for a fix to be released.
Upgrades between releases have always been pretty painless for me. I don’t do a lot of funky stuff like installing packages directly from sources and certainly none of that “automatix” crap. Upgrades via “Update Manager” have always worked for me, with very few problems. I have come to depend on the fact that I can simply fire issue an update-manager -d and everything falls into place more or less correctly. At the end of an upgrade the most that I needed to do was to tweak a few config files, re-enable some repositories that were disabled during the upgrade and I’m done.
The upgrade process from 8.10 to 9.04 went without a hitch. I would even be inclined to say that it was flawless. What disappoints me so much to the point of frustration was that the apparently flawless upgrade had a couple of very nasty gremlins under the hood. When I rebooted my laptop after the upgrade, the Bluetooth light. It did this every single time I booted up. It is not supposed light up if I had it off when I shut down. The much touted 25-second boot up time was a no show. Boot up speed was more or less the same for me.
On my first boot up after upgrading, I was about to update my Medibuntu packages. After hitting “Reload” on Synaptic, it complained about not being able to write to the file system because it was mounted as “read-only”. Uh-oh! This could only mean one of two things: full disk or file system corruption. I thought that this was only a post-upgrade hiccup and it should go away on the next reboot. I rebooted, cleaned up my APT package cache to make sure that I had enough disk space on my root file system and I was able to update the Medibuntu packages.
The next day, I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to turn off the damned Bluetooth light which seems to come on every time the ACPI subsystem was initialized on boot. The config files I tweaked required me to reboot in order to see if they worked in keeping the Bluetooth light off. At one point, rebooting caused fsck to run and it reported that my root file system had errors that needed a manual fsck. I ran fsck manually and there were quite a lot of errors that needed fixing, mostly having to do with unused inodes. During the repair stage, one of the libsvg library files were hosed, causing startup of some of my GNOME panel applets to fail. I reinstalled the library and that fixed it. A couple more reboots and I then fsck was forced to check my home partition because apparently, it was not unmounted cleanly. Boot-time fsck failed with errors and required me to run it manually. In the manual run, it reported a whole lot of unused inode errors, several superblock errors, and directory errors. I lost one photo file in my F-Spot Photos folder. I was starting to get really nervous now. All my project repositories are in my home partition. I can’t afford to lose any of those files so I decided to take a snapshot and dump it on an external hard disk.
I spent all day long rebooting and running fsck. This was because something would crash at some point because of some library not loading. At one point I even ran memcheck to see if it wasn’t my memory. This laptop is only about 7 months old and I would be really disappointed if this was caused by hardware failure. In my previous experience, file system corruption was usually caused by a bad memory stick. Fortunately there were no problems reported by memcheck. fsck with bad blocks checking reports no bad blocks on my hard drive. I can only come to the conclusion that this is a software problem caused by the upgrade. After several more crashes and fsck runs reporting more of the same thing, I was frustrated and I finally gave up. I downloaded the ISO image for Ubuntu 8.10, hoping that it would not crash during download and completely hose my home file system. I had no choice at this point and I wiped my root file system and installed Ubuntu 8.10, which surprisingly caused the Hibernate function to work.
It was a really disappointing and frustrating experience. I think the Ubuntu team has succeeded in their goal of trying to out-Windows Windows. This latest release was so unstable that it made me long for the good old days of Windows ME. This unhealthy obsession with faster boot and shutdown times is causing them to lose focus on system stability and seamless upgrading. I can’t see how having the fastest boot and shutdown time will help make Ubuntu any more useful than it is right now. I don’t really give a flying fart if the OS boots in 25 seconds or 25 minutes. I don’t really care about how slick the on-screen system notifications are. All I really care about is a clean, stable, easily maintained and easily upgraded operating system that does not play Russian Roulette with my files. Hopefully the Ubuntu team gets through this “my OS can boot faster than yours” phase and start working on the more important things. Otherwise, we will all be stuck with an OS that can do nothing more than boot and shutdown: Really fast.
Side note: A “Jackalope” is a mythical creature and sightings of this creature have been attributed to rabbits infected with the Shope Papilloma virus. I think the codename really suites the 9.04 release. It’s a beast that has sprouted some rather curious but completely useless appendages at the expense of being healthy.