solarbird | Apr. 4th, 2013

I’ve been taking advantage of this little schedule break after Norwescon to try to upgrade my DAW from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, because support for 10.04 LTS is going away this month, and also because there are a lot of fixes I need in later versions of Jack and Ardour, and Jack setup and building is so strange that even the author group says DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

I SAID NO SILVER M&Ms IN THE MIX!

It has been an insane nightmare. Had I not been working against a new hard drive onto which I had cloned my old setup, I would’ve been brutally screwed. Did you know 12.04 just bricks some machines – like, send-it-back-to-manufacturer brick them – at startup? Did you know 12.04 upgrade can and will render your machine unbootable? (That happened to me through the GUI; I had to re-image the drive. Also? The install disc for 12.04? I never even get to the first setup dialogue. Hangs.) Did you know that if you try to do a stepwise upgrade as per the instructions here that the tool you use to do it is hardcoded to look in the wrong place for the upgrade files, and that this bug is known and supposedly fixed but still happens to me?

Shall I go on? Because I can. This is why I smashed an Ubuntu install CD yesterday out of frustration and rage. (See above.)

Anyway, I eventually got the server upgrade path to work – it was literally the last route available, but it got me there, mostly. After putting my machine in a state which would leave it unbootable, it had the decency not to force a reboot, and after a few hours, I fixed it. This is also a known bug. If you upgrade in the GUI, you’re just pooched. As I was, except I was working off a new image, my original drives untouched, so I could start over.

Even with all of the above, I’d currently be dead in the water again(!), except the 3.1.5 kernel I installed myself to work around a combination of kernel bug and ill-behaved USB external sound hardware which enumerates its own hardware incorrectly(!) is booting fine, and running fine, under 12.04. So I’m actually up and running! As of around 2am this morning.

However, the kernel the installer wants to install is 3.2.0-39, and it panics at startup. That’s a later version, and I’m worried that this might bite me in the ass somewhere.

Will it? Anybody know? Will 12.04 be stable under a 3.1.5 kernel?

3.2.0-39 doesn’t even get loaded. Here, see if you have any ideas:

Starting up... [0.929456] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0) [0.929507] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-39-generic #62-Ubuntu [0.929552] Call Trace: [0.929594] [<c1561988>] fukkit I'm not typing all this in. printk, panic, mount_block_root, ? sys_mknod, mount_root, prepare_namespace, ?sys_access, kernel_init, ? start_kernel, kernel_thread_helper.

The 3.1.5 kernel (same drive, same directory, same install, etc) launches fine.

So even if I get this working completely, I’ll be looking at a new distribution next time. This is obscene. The fact that pretty much everything I ran into – once I got the drive cloned, where I hit other problems, such as grub insisting that I had no hard drives after booting from one of them and mounting three – is known, and that the core dev team is basically okay with that tells me I’m kind of done with Ubuntu.

Mageia has been recommended highly. So has Mint, but I was later told Mint is just Ubuntu with a different GUI.

Got anything to declare?