Friday, April 24, 2009

Ubuntu Expired On Me!

So, I boot up my notebook into linux (Ubuntu 7) for first time in a while, maybe 2-3 months, to prepare it for a meeting. I'm a good boy and first go to install the updates I know will be there. It says it cannot find some. Strange.

On a hunch I wonder if Ubuntu 7 has reached end of life. But, no, this page tells me Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) is still current:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes

It is wrong. Ubuntu obviously haven't read their own press releases. It EOL-ed a week ago:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-7.10-eol

What is annoying is how EOL breaks everything. Packages won't validate. Worse, I cannot install some new software (such as mysql; but I could install lame). This is not simply "we're not going to do updates any more". This is "We've pulled the plug. Should've upgraded earlier. Loser."

Two forehead slaps for Ubuntu in the space of a week. I'll be back to Fedora at this rate!

Anyway, I started the upgrade to 8.04, but after running for 20 minutes it finally told me it was going to take 19hrs to run. Not good timing for my meeting!

By the way, 19hrs was a bad estimate. It takes 10-20 minutes to get it started, then 3-4 hours downloading, then 1+hrs installing. It took 6 hrs in total for me. You can leave it alone for the downloading, but need to be around to answer questions during the install stage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There's a wealth of software for Developers in the Fedora repositories. When you install, you can select software-type groups and customize your selections within the groups -- but a lot of the most interesting stuff is not in the groups, you can find it only by going through the alphabetical-list view of "Add [/remove] (repository) software". Also there's now "preupgrade" software for prepping a system for upgrading. Fedora 10 had dependency problems with KDE 3 & 4 desktops when it was first released, but is probably OK now if you do a fresh install and add KDE desktop later. Also YUM and YUMEX (optional installs) do a very good job of solving many dependency problems. RHEL clone CENTOS has very good support on its mailing list, though there seems to be much less bundled software than for Fedora, for example.