Some thoughts for the future

Stelian Iancu stelian.iancu at gmx.net
Fri Jul 1 00:25:04 UTC 2005


> I'm actually pretty impressed with how Ubuntu handles this, with the
> Synaptic front-end for apt-get package management.  I've yet to hear of a
> basic user borking their Ubuntu system or having troubles with it.  People
> who get into trouble with Ubuntu are generally those folks who try to get
> away with tricks on their Ubuntu system that isn't supported in the basic
> system: like compile Java from scratch or get a proprietary wireless card
> to work with ndiswrapper using non-standard encryption tools, and so on. 
> Heh.

Well, look no further cause I've managed to bork my Ubuntu install 2 days 
after installing it. What happened? Well, after installation, I went on to 
upgrade it. First off, the upgrade was slow as hell. I don't know why, but 
apt-get kept on stopping at something with "Getting headers" (I am quoting 
from memory). At first I thought it had something to do with the MTU of the 
ethernet interface, because in windows I've had in the past some problems 
with the default value, 1500, and I had to change it to 1440. So here I did 
the same thing, but nothing. Eventually, after a couple of retries, it did 
download and installed the updates. 

Then, the next day, the new update graphical app that appeared in Hoary told 
me that there are some more updates, but they cannot be installed due to some 
problems. Anyway, I went to the CLI and issued a sudo apt-get update && sudo 
apt-get upgrade and it told me that it needed to install some packages that 
depend on some other packages that were uninstallable. And it recommended me 
to do an apt-get dist-upgrade instead (I didn't understand why). I did it and 
it took a LOT of retries. Anyway, in the end, I've upgraded but then I 
couldn't boot anymore. I kept on getting kernel panics. At this point I was 
so pissed off, that I've put in the FC4 DVD and installed it. I admit I 
didn't study the kernel panic problems that I had with Ubuntu after the 
dist-upgrade and maybe they were easy to fix.

Now I am very pleased with FC4. Ubuntu seems to have far more packages (thanks 
to Debian) available and in FC4 I've had to rebuild rpm's and even install 
from source some things (because I am not yet skilled enough to create my own 
rpm's), but other than that, it was a great experience so far.

S.




More information about the users mailing list