WARNING if you upgrade from Kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 you will experience problems. The nice GUI that pops up 'want to upgrade?' is deceivingly simple. First off one of my keys (ca certificates if memory serves) was corrupted so the installation was interrupted. I managed to fix that through special boots and recommended programs to clean it up...

Then once booted FLASH, my INTERNET, and SOUND broke. WTF guys don't you QA your shit? I managed to fix FLASH through googling but I still have NO SOUND. Also getting the Internet working was a bitch because they don't use knetwork manager anymore they use a plasma application NM. Try googling for fixes to connect to the Internet without the Internet LOL!!

So I guess the point of this post is

• #1 upgrades are always dangerous
• #2 Anyone figure out the cleanest way to fix sound? I see some pulseaudio junk when I google but there's got to be a cleaner soln.

Ubuntu's upgrade are always a mess. I encounter problems every time and this time was the worst : gdm was completely broken so I couldn't enter my desktop... (that's user friendly ?). Even now, I can't run compiz :S

I've got no problem with sounds though.

Good luck ^^"

Fortunately, I haven't experienced the issues you're describing. I've upgraded from 6.10 through 9.04 without issue, and I'm using Compiz fusion, Cairo Dock, proprietary Nvidia drivers, etc., so I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

About your sound: Check that "mute" is unchecked and also that PCM is all the way up. That resolves it for most folks. FWIW, I'm using Gnome and not KDE, so maybe that's the difference?

Joe

I think the problem is the KDE desktop. I and several users I know upgraded from 8.04 to 9.10 under GNOME without any problems whatsoever. Just for a change, I installed the KDE desktop recently and had loads of problems, some of which were similar to the ones you described.

I have always used Gnome and it didn't protect me against problems :P It may be less bad though ^^

BTW, I tried reinstalling compiz and co earlier, and it works now

I tried the upgrade on my desktop..........ended up wiping it out and doing a clean install. Still getting used to KDE 4.

Got the 64 bit version and cleared out vista on my son's Acer 5520. Has a power down bug.

I can hear sound now. Under "KDE>System Settings>Multimedia" you can see your sound drivers, I have HDA Intel and PulseAudio. My PulseAudio doesn't work but then a popup tells me it auto-defaults back to HDA Intel. [So maybe it was user error because I also adjusted the sound levels in KMixer (thanks jamillikan), hard to pinpoint the fix when you do a hundred things at once] You can then use their "Test" button to play some sound. I also tested flash (youtube.com) and Amarok.

Oh and for the record my "Network Management" Plasma Widget didn't start and was buggy, hour glass forever, never load, etc... I had to reboot to older kernel to get it to start this morning.

YellowHammer
Since you're in the process of installing I'd suggest 32-bit. The cost of 64-bit is still too high, even though the vendors are starting to convert. For example Java has a 64-bit plugin...but guess what it's worthless! It doesn't do Applets or Java Web Start, come on!

Sounds is still flaky and it's NOT user error because I can recreate the problem. Between Kernel 2.6.27-11 and 2.6.28-11 my sound broke, in the GRUB loader if I manually select 2.6.27-11 sound works great. But when I load 2.6.28-11 = no sound.

I tried updating from Kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 and had a number of issues with programs not working. I ended up doing a clean install and then everything worked perfectly. - Except that I can't seem to get VLC to work, but that's another story...

In fact, the best way to migrate, is actually to resintall from scratch.

I used to use the upgrade button, but the October 2007 upgrade (7.10) went crazy on me. I find the best way is to keep /home on a separate partition and just reinstall the base system from scratch each time. That preserves my wallpaper, my cairo-dock, my everything. All I have to do is reinstall programs and codecs.

When I installed on the laptop I went with this type of set up in the anticipation of installing the base on the next release.

/ 30GB
/home 100GB
swap 20GB

My question would be how to just install the base into the / on the next upgrade?

Sure thing.

Burn an ISO of the new distro (I still usually waited 1 or 2 days in case of any major bugs) and when you get to the partition screen select manual partitioning. Specify where everything is- i.e. 30gb is / and select format the partition, 100gb is /home, do not format partition.

On an aside... I think that swap space is excessive. I have 2gb of ram and 4gb of swap (The great Linux guru who taught me always said swap=ram*2) and looking at the system monitor I never use more than a tiny fraction of that swap. If I am mistaken I kindly welcome correction.

When you install the next upgrade, go through the installation as you would but when you come to the Disk Partition, your existing partitions will be picked up automatically. Select "manual" and just format the partition that root gets mounted into but not the other partitions. For example if your current mount points are:

/ 30GB /dev/sda1
/home 100GB /dev/sda3
swap 20GB /dev/sda4

Then just format /dev/sda1. Reset your mount points as they are now and continue with the installation. The system will get installed into / and the contents of /home will be untouched.

The thing to bear in mind is that the physical partitions are just containers that you can fill with anything and you can attach (mount) them to any point in the filing system structure.

Aha...........that was a "special " hassle. During the wipe out of Vista and reformatting that last 20GB would not format as anything but ntfs or swap. Kicked my keister for a while trying to figure out why the computer would lock up during the install/format portion and the HD made funny sounds. BTW...I went with the ext4.