ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

Ubuntu Oneiric upgrade (Thinkpad/Xmonad)

I upgraded from Ubuntu Natty Narwhal to Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) today. Lots of things broke. In order:

  • “Could not calculate the upgrade.” No indication of what the error might be; in my case, the error ended up being old orphan OpenAFS kernel modules (for whom no kernel modules existed). I also took the opportunity to clean up my PPAs.
  • “Reading changelogs.” apt-listchanges isn’t particularly useful, and I don’t know why I installed it. But it’s really painful when it’s taking more time to read changelogs than to install your software. Geoffrey suggested gdb -p `pgrep apt-listchanges` and then forcing it to call exit(0), which worked like a charm. Had to do this several times; thought it was infinitely looping.
  • Icons didn’t work, menus ugly. Go to “System Settings > Appearance” and go set a new theme; in all likelihood your old theme went away. This AskUbuntu question gave a clue.
  • Network Manager stopped working. For some inscrutable reason the default NetworkManager config file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf has managed=false for ifupdown. Flip back to true.
  • New window manager, new defaults to dunk you in Unity at least once. Just make sure you pick the right window manager from the little gear icon.
  • gnome-power-manager went away. If you fix icons a not-so-useful icon will show up anyway when you load gnome-settings-daemon.
  • “Waiting for network configuration.” There were lots of suggestions here. My /var/run and /var/lock were borked so I did these instructions, I also hear that you should punt wlan0 from /etc/network/interfaces and remove it from /etc/udev/rules.d70-persistent-net.rules. I also commented out the sleeps in /init/failsafe.conf for good measure.
  • Default GHC is 7.0.3! Blow away your .cabal (but hold onto .cabal/config) and go reinstall Haskell Platform. Don’t forget to make sure you install profiling libraries, and grab xmonad and xmonad-contrib. Note that previous haskell-platform installs will be rather broken, on account of missing GHC 6 binaries (you can reinstall them, but it looks like they get replaced.)
  • ACPI stopped knowing about X, so if you have scripts for handling rotation, source /usr/share/acpi-support/power-funcs and run getXuser and getXconsole
  • DBUS didn’t start. This is due to leftover pid and socket files, see this bug
  • Was mysteriously fscking my root drive on every boot. Check your pass param in /etc/fstab; should be 0.
  • Redshift mysteriously was being reset by xrandr calls; worked around by calling it oneshot immediately after running xrandr.
  • Not sure if this was related to the upgrade, but fixed an annoyance where suspend-checking (in case you are coming out of hibernate) was taking a really long time in boot. Set resume to right swap in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume and update-initramfs -u with great prejudice).

Unresolved annoyances: X11 autolaunching in DBUS, the power icon doesn’t always properly show AC information and is too small in stalonetray, xmobar doesn’t support percentage battery and AC coloring simultaneously (I have a patch), a totem built from scratch segfaults.

13 Responses to “Ubuntu Oneiric upgrade (Thinkpad/Xmonad)”

  1. paurullan says:
    November 24, 2011 at 5:29 am

    I know Ubuntu reaches the sweet spot between Debian stable and unstable but I am almost scared to recommend anybody upgrade and Ubuntu release!

  2. Nicolas Wu says:
    November 24, 2011 at 5:53 am

    I also found that it broke Skype: I can no longer receive video.

  3. yachris says:
    November 24, 2011 at 9:50 am

    This is why I have two partitions: one for root, one for user. I keep everything important (programs I’m working on, music, photos, etc.) on the user partition, and install as little as possible on root.

    Then when a new distribution comes out, I do a reformat and clean install. This post is why.

  4. Anonymous says:
    November 24, 2011 at 10:39 am

    Switch to Arch. I switched after a similar episode and I cannot recommend it enough!

  5. Edward Z. Yang says:
    November 24, 2011 at 11:00 am

    Yeah, honestly, Ubuntu pulls these shenanigans every major release, and I just deal with it by never upgrading until, e.g. major holiday. To be fair though, except for the DBUS problem, most of these problems came from the rampant customization that I make on my install (this is also why I’d be terrified of a fresh install: with an upgrade, I know I’ll do a bounded amount of work to make things work again; with a fresh install, who knows how much configuration I’ll lose?)

  6. Tristram Brelstaff says:
    November 24, 2011 at 11:01 am

    I also do a clean install of Ubuntu each time instead of upgrading. I found out a while back that it was actually faster to do things that way (as well as being simpler).

  7. Edward Z. Yang says:
    November 24, 2011 at 11:05 am

    Sigh. Remember when we had to do this “clean install” stuf for Windows? Boy times have change.

  8. agumonkey says:
    November 24, 2011 at 12:42 pm

    welcome to 1995.
    *sad*

    sent from xp

  9. refold says:
    November 24, 2011 at 1:13 pm

    > Default GHC is 7.0.3!

    This is why I always install GHC & cabal-install manually and don’t use distro packages.

  10. Anonymous says:
    November 24, 2011 at 4:56 pm

    i’m new at functional programming (and lambda calculus) so excusse me if my question is silly, or the answer too obvious :D

    Why does f (g x (h y (a + b))) translates into f(g(x,h(y,a + b)) and not to f(g,x(h,y(a+b))). I understood the syntax from the article this way: after the ‘$’ symbol we have a parenthesis, where the variables (right “operators” of the ‘$’ symbol) that follow, are the arguments to the left “operator” of the ‘$’ (the function).

    where am i wrong? thnks in advance for your answers :D

  11. Qi Qi says:
    November 24, 2011 at 11:06 pm

    That’s why I had my thinkpad settled with Debian a few years ago because of its rolling upgrade. And also I have Xmonad coupled with Gnome 3’s fallback.

  12. Evan says:
    December 6, 2011 at 1:46 am

    Just remembered that I meant to comment about this, in the interests of trying to spread good information.

    NetworkManager’s managed=true setting in the ifupdown plugin is connected to how it handles /etc/network/interfaces. The assumption in the default install is that if you configured a device in /etc/network/interfaces, you want it managed by ifupdown and not NM, so NM does not try to configure those interfaces itself. This is a reasonable default setting because NM doesn’t yet support the full range of capabilities that /etc/network/interfaces has (e.g. obscure things like interface bonding and bridge interfaces)

    The generally correct way to configure a modern Debian/Ubuntu desktop is to remove all non-loopback interfaces from /etc/network/interfaces and let NM take over. This likely would have also kept you from triggering the /etc/init/failsafe.conf Upstart job (which was put in place because Ubuntu server systems were booting fast enough that traditional init scripts were running before networking was up – http://pad.lv/580319)

    Also, in defense of Ubuntu, almost all of the problems you describe sound to me like they are connected to external upgrades – the GNOME 3 transition in particular – which means that you likely would have had many of those issues upgrading from any GNOME 2 distribution to its GNOME 3 release.

  13. ubuntu的apt-get upgrade命令停在read changlog不工作的处理办法ubuntu的apt-get upgrade命令停在read changlog不工作了。 | Changblog says:
    February 20, 2012 at 5:28 pm

    […] 重试，问题依旧。后来搜索“Reading changelogs”发现这篇文章中提到apt-listchanges “Reading changelogs.” apt-listchanges isn’t particularly useful, and […]

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