[ale] Ubuntu Desktop 13.10

[Edward Holcroft]

Just upgraded my 3 home Ubuntu boxes to 13.10.

Was a seamless upgrade on 2 machines (64 bit). On one 8 year-old notebook
that gets used heavily for Facebook etc every day (32 bit) everything froze
up half way through. It seemed like the CPU became overheated during
installation - was very hot to the touch. Could run a command line and top
did not reveal anything out of the ordinary like a CPU spike. I was unable
to get dpkg to release the sources.list file no matter what kills I tried,
so did a reboot followed by live-DVD repair. The repair option is pretty
impressive - found the broken 13.10 installation and fixed it while keeping
all data files intact as well as the Doze 7 on dual boot left unharmed.

Seems to be a minor upgrade, I'm not seeing any real visual differences,
other than a bunch of new lenses, which I don't really use extensively. New
kernel of course, and latest versions of various apps. This leads me to
think about 14.04, which I would guess, would be another minor upgrade,
given that it's LTS. If that's the case, and I cannot see Canonical going
ott on an LTS release, it'd make for two fairly boring releases
consecutively, which is interesting given the recent releases that have
been bleeding edge to the point of being sub-functional if not broken in
some areas. I'm kinda pleased they focused on just getting things stable
rather than going with the threatened move to Mir at this point. I recently
switched my work desktop to Wheezy stable (bit of an overreaction I guess,
I could've dropped back to 12.04 or so, but I've always wanted to try a
Debian desktop) 'cos Unity was just breaking on me way too often. It'll be
really interesting/surprising if they bring Mir in for 14.04.

On the 32 bit version, Chrome still seems to be broken. This issue from
13.04 is still there:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/359530/google-chrome-update-wont-install-due-to-unmet-dependencies

Although you can make it work if you try, it'd be nice to see a fixed
version released.

Another issue that came up on one of my 64 bit boxes (although I don't
think it's a specifically 64 bit issue) is too little disk space on /boot,
so the upgrade failed until that was addressed. I had too many kernels in
there and had to delete the old ones. I used this handy script that I've
used many times on my Amazon Ubuntu servers:

dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2
-d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge

from here:

http://tuxtweaks.com/2010/10/remove-old-kernels-in-ubuntu-with-one-command/

I see this as an unacceptable error on a distro aimed at easy installation,
noob demographic. Most noobs I know would've run a mile at an error like
that. Of course, if this was fresh installation, I would not have
experienced this issue since there'd be no old kernels installed. But why
on earth would there be a limit (and apparently a relatively low one at
that) on /boot on a distro of this nature?

Anyway, that's my quick first experience with 13.10 ... it works, a bit of
a yawn, frankly. Nothing that jumps out at me to say don't touch this.
Still a great distro for first timers, and even experienced users as long
as Unity can hold it together under high user demands.

cheers
ed

-- 
Edward Holcroft | Madsen Kneppers & Associates Inc.
3020 Holcomb Bridge Rd. NW | Norcross, GA 30071
O (770) 446-9606 | M (770) 630-0949

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