So as a general rule, I have always preferred fresh installs to upgrades (this is mostly from my Windows experiences with upgrades but I've carried this behaviour over to Linux). However, Upgrade Manager made upgrading (from 9.04 to 9.10) look so easy that I had to try it. I was impressed that the upgrade was really as easy as it looked and the whole process went without a hitch. I rebooted into 9.10 and all seemed well.

However, I've been experiencing general instability when using this upgraded distribution on my computer. For starters, whenever I log into my GNOME desktop, on of the following is very likely (though not guaranteed) to happen:


1. The NetworkManager icon will not appear (nm-applet). I'm not certain that NetworkManager itself isn't running but, without the icon, I can't interact with it. A solution is to 'killall nm-applet; nm-applet &' in a Terminal.

2. My mouse cursor will update in a very jerky fashion. I've traced this particular problem to GNOME Do which will consume 100% CPU resources. The only solution to this is to kill Do and then restart it, after which it runs fine.

3. Occasionally, I will see two GNOME Do icons in my notification area, only one of which responds to clicking. I can confirm that only one instance of Do is running. (At the moment, there are two--and incidentally the NetworkManager applet is nowhere to be found).

4. Do managed to throw a WIN32 Exception once. This gave me unpleasant flashbacks.

5. I occasionally get notifications that npviewer.bin has crashed. I suspect that this has always been happening; Karmic must now just have a graphical way of notifying me that the Flash plugin is crap on 64-bit Linux. (I already knew this.)


Any combination of #1 thru #4 above are liable to happen at random, only at login. The last one requires Firefox to be running--and I usually only see it when I'm closing Firefox.

My question is: are these known issues with 9.10/Karmic? Or is this just what I get for performing an upgrade instead of a fresh install?

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks!

My 32-bit laptop upgraded nicely. I've been through a couple of versions safely with the upgrade option on my 32-bit machines.

Encouraged, I decided to live update a server I was building. The upgrade didn't go well and I lost my desktop. Oh well, lets fresh install the 64 bit desktop version. That went worse. I use mdadm software RAID 1 and the grub2 from the desktop version wouldn't configure for RAID on install. I spent half the weekend trying to learn grub2. Today I tried the "server" version and it just worked! Next I needed gnome. So far, I've got a minimal install of gnome going by installing gdm. apt-get install gnome didn't work.

I fear there is going to be a learning curve for the gnome new features as well as grub2.

I was looking so forward to the release of Ubuntu 9.10. Finally the release, download and install. Well, I have reverted back to 9.04 on my notebook (Dell E1505/6400). Wine didn't work. VirtualBox, worked kinda/sorta. The proposed increased speed to boot, well 9.04 boots in 56 seconds, 9.10 just over a minute. Internet surfing speed was ridiculously slow. Took way to long for screens to load and refresh. However, unlike the upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 there were no issues with wireless connections to my home router.

I was surprised that with the popularity of VirtualBox and Wine that there would be any issues with these applications. I would expect these types of problems with a M$ release, but not Ubuntu.

The interface was very nice. Not enough to keep me excited past one day. I don't have the time right now to geek around to get the broken stuff working. Full time student and working full time leave little geek time these days. Maybe version 10.04 will be more stable??

i tried to update from 9.10ß on my netbook to 9.10 with out any sucsess,
i just ended up getting a load of kernel level messages sent to all TTYs with somthing about sda and a load of errors,
so far a fresh install of 9.10UNR has fixed this nicely and it takes much less time to boot than 9.10ß did (but not quite as fast as 9.04 was)

I am continually amazed that people are disappointed by the Ubuntu releases. On all but my test boxes I delay ugrading until the next is due out - generally allows others to sort out all the bugs.
I upgraded my non-test boxes to 9.04 two weeks ago - 9.10 can wait a few months.

FWIW I did an online update to 9.10 on an old Inspiron 1100 (so I could keep grub classic), and things appear to going just as well as 9.04.

i have never been dissapointed by a relice, just dissapointed by the upgrade process, it has never worked for me , so i allways end up doing a clean install

Just updated a Dell Mini 9 from 9.04 to 9.10 without incident. Everything is running faster/better than the 8.04 that came originally from the dell. To get from 8, I booted on a usb flash drive to install 9.04, then upgraded onlin to 9.10

So far, the Dell Mini 9, and my Dell C10 laptop have come up on the plus end.

I've had problems ranging from losing my restricted file format and jaunty updates to not being able to download new packages, or at least the couple I have tried.

I came to this forum to see if I might be better off just swithching to another OS, or doing a system restore, or just plain installing .04 fresh. Were I to switch to another OS, any suggestions?