[geeks] Policy for system / package upgrades in Enterprise

[nate at portents.com]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:24:46 +0300, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 01:00:15PM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
>>I don't recall this.  Pretty sure I had no trouble with IDE optical
drives
>>and 9.04.  I do remember some change they made to device symlinks, had
to
>>manually create the properly named ones for things to work after one of
>>the
>>OS updates years ago, but that's about it.
> 
> It was not a case of bad symlinks, it simply could not read any data off
> of the drives. I tried this on several systems and for a while used my
USB
> external drive when I needed to read or write a DVD and could not just
> mount
> it over the network from a drive on a Debian system that worked.

I just researched it, and it looks like there was a new PATA driver that
made it's way into Ubuntu that was(/is?) buggy for some people, as talked
about here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1347801

Note that the last poster reported they got their 1998 Toshiba laptop
drive working with a 'modprobe pata_pnpisa' command.  Interesting.  Guess I
got lucky with the optical drives I was using.  Do you know what
brands/models you had trouble with?

>>> BTW 9.04 also never worked on an Intel Atom or similar processor
>>
>>I didn't have any problems running 9.04 on my Acer Aspire One with an
>>Intel Atom (well short of the Atheros wifi driver issues, but I
ultimately
>>solved those by swapping out that wifi card with an Intel one).
> 
> Was it the original 9.04 or the "NetBook Respin"? The Original flavor
did
> not boot and it was known at release time.

It was the original 9.04, I never bothered with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix
(now called the Ubuntu Netbook Edition).  I'm not sure when I upgraded to
9.04 though, it might have been several weeks after release... after one
bad experience years ago jumping on a new release the day it came out, I
made a decision to give all releases a few weeks to get their kinks worked
out before I try them.

> Something was changed and it failed
> in an early release candidate, then it worked, and in the final one it
> failed.

Sounds like I dodged a bullet there.

> However no one bothered to test it and by the time they did the deadline
> for
> fixes was past. The people running the project decided not to make an
> exception, nor document it, as in "DON'T INSTALL THIS IF YOU HAVE AN
ATOM
> PROCESSOR" on the release notes, download page, etc.

Documentation for anything notebook related has always been iffy.  It
would help Linux a lot, especially for notebook users, to have a single
comprehensive source they could go to about hardware support, rather than
rely on piecing information together from all over the way a person often
has to these days.

> The Netbook respin was created to get something working at all on ATOM 
> processors, and it included their special "Netbook" bloat.

My impression was the Netbook Remix was as much about creating a new UI
that was easy to use on a small screen and for first-time computer users,
which was where the Netbooks were being initially marketed.  The fact that
they fixed any Atom-related bugs would probably just be a necessary side
effect of targeting such a narrow platform.

- Nate