Pass on upgrade to Quantal Quetzal 12.10

I've been following the development of Quantal Quetzal in passive mode. I need the development release to maintain the Wubi move and resize scripts, so I don't have much choice in the matter, but I haven't been as involved this time around.

The most striking difference between development on Quantal and that on Precise Pangolin 12.04 has been the quality drop-off. Precise was remarkably stable throughout the development cycle, whereas 12.10 has had some rough patches, making it barely usable at times. Most recently I've found the zombie application window problem - which is when I've closed some applications but they still appear to be active - almost like an overlay on the desktop. In fact, moving to separate workspaces shows these zombie windows and even the launcher has the active window indicator. Now normally this isn't too big a deal - in development we expect some weird stuff - but it's very close to release, and what's more, this is a recent 'development' (as it were). So that doesn't bode well.

So what's really new with Quantal? What new benefits are there?
I'm having a bit of a problem figuring this one out.

• During development they renamed "Shut down..." to "Switch off..." on the system menu (but not the Shut down dialog pop up). Then they renamed it back to "Shut down..." a few weeks ago. 
• They've added the "Restart..." option back to the System menu that was removed in 12.04.
• They've combined the User and System menu into one
• The i386 non-PAE kernel has been removed so the PAE kernel becomes default on 32-bit installs
• They've added Amazon online search results to the main Unity search lens that ironically seems to return adult-themed toys for innocent search strings dynamically as you type. Because as everyone knows, sometimes you just randomly decide to buy things online when you're searching for documents on your computer.
• They changed some icons on the mail envelope a lot and then removed them
• There's no more live CD since the ISO is too big to fit on a CD. So you'll need a DVD or USB.
• There's no more alternate CD because support and testing two images takes too much time and they figure that the text installer is not needed anymore - and for those that do they can use the netboot ISO.
• There's a new version of Grub that supports UEFI secure boot (I believe this is on 12.04 as well)
• For Wubi, you won't be able to install Xubuntu anymore, but they have finally fixed the links for Kubuntu so that will be available and working.

Okay that was a list of nothing. What are the benefits?

Well, I really like the new blue sky wallpaper. And there are obviously lots of other little changes that may be important to users, like updates to more recent versions of some applications.

Upgrade Recommendation
I'd say pass on the upgrade unless there's something specific that you need. But bear in mind that if you decide to upgrade to 13.04 later, you'll still need to upgrade to 12.10 along the way.
Remember that there will be some new bugs introduced with the mainly cosmetic changes, added to the unfixed bugs from 12.04.
If you do decide to upgrade please make sure you have at least 3 GB free space - see here for more upgrade tips.

Wubi default
For new Wubi users, you'll be installing 12.10 by default from here. Get the wubi.exe for 12.04 from here instead if you prefer.

How to upgrade a Wubi install

Yes it's that time again. A new Ubuntu release is around the corner, and that means that many people will be upgrading. If you have a Wubi install and look for advice, you'll probably be sternly warned that "Wubi wasn't intended for long term use... blah blah yawn". That's all great, but you're using Wubi and want to upgrade, and the reality is many people will do it anyway.

Upgrades fail

Shocking, but true. Ubuntu upgrades do fail. Frequently. Many people swear by fresh installs. Personally, I've upgraded to every release since 9.10 and with Wubi testing since 8.04. And 9 times out of 10 they worked okay (for me). The upgrade to 10.04 was probably the worst as you had to Ctrl-C at some point during a loop etc.

But nonetheless, every install is different and many fail (Wubi and normal both). So what to do?

Backup

This is a no-brainer. It's so easy to write it and read it and agree with it. But the way that the Update Manager suddenly jumps up "A new release is available. Do you want to upgrade?" - it seems so easy to just click that button. Even without reading the release notes (which may help you but not in all cases).

So... DON'T DO IT. Not until you've got a disaster recovery plan in place (the work-speak way of saying you have a backup and know how to restore it).

You should probably already have all your important data backed up, stored on the /host or other normal partition (or synched to Ubuntu One). Because data on the virtual disk is at a higher risk of being lost.

Full Wubi backups

On Wubi, it's really simple to do make a fully bootable backup. If you installed on your C: 'drive', then boot Windows, and copy the entire C:\ubuntu\disks folder. It's going to be big, so make sure you have enough free space, or copy it to an external drive if you need to. If things go wrong during the upgrade, you just have to copy it back and you have a full Ubuntu restore.

Preparation for upgrade

Make sure you have enough free space on the root.disk. Many people underestimate how much space is needed (and apparently the Ubuntu upgrade process also underestimates it, or has in the past). Personally I would make sure there's 5GB free, maybe 3GB minimum (that's sucking it out of my thumb, but the message is don't try it with the bare minimum).  Note, you can also resize the root.disk if you need to. At the same time, process all updates to the current release before hand.

To check free space, run df -h from the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T). You're looking for the amount of free space on /dev/loop0 (that's the 'loop-mounted' root.disk)

Browse the forums

Take the time to see how bad the upgrade is. Other people will be doing it and posting the results (if they are bad). Get a feel for what the problems are.

Alternate CD upgrade

I strongly recommend using the Alternate CD to upgrade. Why? Because when the new release comes, every man and his dog starts to upgrade, and the servers struggle. So a 1 hour download suddenly becomes 3 hours or longer. Or times out. And you're up at 2am watching it (because at some point you're going to have to click that darn "OK" button for some meaningless prompt, or else you'll have to do it when you wake up).

Whereas, if you download the Alternate CD ISO, using a bittorrent client, it will likely take 30 minutes. Then you upgrade offline (maybe not recommended by Canonical, because this stops you downloading the latest packages) and you've just saved yourself a couple of hours. 

There's no rush

It's not going to hurt you to wait a month to upgrade. At that point, it should be very clear what problems there are if any, and there may even be fixes. Also the servers will be quieter, so doing an online upgrade gets you the latest packages. You can still run the Alternate upgrade, but let it download the latest packages online (still quicker than downloading all the new packages).

Caveats

Normally by this time in the development cycle, I've run a few Wubi upgrades. So I'm usually speaking from a position of knowledge that the upgrade can work. This time, I've been unable to test due to one of my computers dying, and a bunch of other time consuming things. Maybe I'll get the time to do this still (9 days to go as at the time of writing, in which case I'll add a comment to indicate that).

Update: I ran two upgrades, 10.04 to 12.04 and 11.10 to 12.04. I ran both online (not with the alternate CD - it helps having a 50Mbps connection and minimal server traffic). I confirmed that 2 GB is too little space - it downloads about 1800 packages and 'unpacks' them - and this uses a lot of space (that is mostly freed up at the end). So be warned - the upgrade tool does not stop you running out of space.
The 11.10 upgrade was on a real, in use installation, and worked flawlessly. The 10.04 was on a brand new, bare-bones 10.04.4 install with updates applied, and gave a number of errors and some weirdness (empty message box with 2 unknown buttons) - but succeeded as well.

Summary
1. Backup (always prepare for the worst)
2. Minimum 3 GB free space (preferably more)
3. 1800 packages to download so consider using the Alternate CD to speed things up

Another update: if you have a custom graphics driver, or use ppas, then it seems to be recommended to remove these before upgrading, and then reinstall following the upgrade.

Natty 11.04 Alpha 1 Upgrade with Wubi - Latest

I ran the Natty upgrade again today from my backed up maverick root.disk using the daily Alternate CD (January 12*). There are some interesting changes. For one, lots more errors during the upgrade including one saying the whole upgrade failed. But it didn't.

And a nice change is that as I logged in - forgetting to switch from Unity to the Classic desktop - there was a popup informing me that my hardware did not support unity and, would I like to switch to classic? Great! It didn't work, but a good idea all the same - and I assume it will work soon.

So after re-creating the 'logout launcher' I escaped Unity and switched manually to Classic Desktop and then it logged in fine (apart from having to reload all the crashing panel objects.)

Here are some pics from the upgrade process. The following popup appeared at least 3 times (and might have something to do with the fact that Natty has my keyboard set up as USA/Afghanistan now) ...

This one looked serious:

This one sounded like it was toast:

Despite the serious message - the upgrade worked, Natty booted first time... and nothing too exciting has happened since.

* I ran the upgrade from the daily image of the Alternate CD on January 10 and January 12 successfully. The images shown are from Jan 12; there were no material differences that I've noticed between the two. When I attempted to do it on Jan 11 it wouldn't allow the upgrade to begin due to some package with an incorrect version. The message is, if you find that the upgrade fails one day, just wait and try the following day (this is normal for alpha testing since the repositories are updated frequently and sometimes packages get out of synch). Also, be careful if you are offered a Partial Upgrade when running the Update Manager in Natty. Sometimes this is required but often it's an out of synch set of updates so it's best to be sure - use apt-get update and dist-upgrade to figure out what will be removed and decide whether it's an error or required.

Upgrade to Natty 11.04 Alpha 1 with Wubi

An alternative to installing Wubi 11.04 Natty Alpha 1 from scratch - which is a convoluted process at the moment... is to upgrade from a current Maverick install. This bypasses the bad wubildr and Ubiquity installer issues. It does take a little bit longer to get setup, but it's quicker to repeat the upgrade.

Warning: with Alpha testing, something that works one day, may break the next. Please don't attempt this unless you have a dedicated test machine. The following example installs Wubi to the same partition as Windows (C:) - there is a difference, see note at bottom.

Step 1 - Install Wubi 10.10 Maverick
I picked 6GB for my install size.
Run all available updates.
Boot back into Windows and backup the root.disk and c:\wubildr (for repeat testing)

Step 2 - Download the daily 11.04 Natty Alternate CD
Since you'll probably want to repeat the upgrade at some point, it's a good idea to use zsync to keep your .iso up to date. If this is a once off, you could skip this step and just run the update online, but it takes much longer, in my experience than just downloading the alternate CD.

To download the 32-bit alternate CD:

zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily/current/natty-alternate-i386.iso.zsync

See this for more info on zsync: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ZsyncCdImage

Step 3 - Upgrade to Natty
Boot into the Wubi maverick install and run the upgrade from the alternate CD:

sudo mount -o loop natty-alternate-i386.iso /mnt
sudo /mnt/cdromupgrade

When you start the upgrade it asks you whether to check the internet for the latest packages - it's not really necessary since you have the latest daily image - and there's less chance of catching a buggy update - plus it's much quicker running just off the alternate image.

During the upgrade you get prompted a few times, but nothing exciting happened. I noticed by watching the grub.cfg file get regenerated (at least) 3 times and seeing the exception output, that the /boot/grub folder remains empty until the final time, when grub-install runs. This updates the wubildr and also places all the grub modules in /boot/grub. At the end the grub.cfg is regenerated in the same way that breaks wubi installs on 10.04.1 and upgrades to 10.10.

Step 4 - Reboot into Natty
The Wubi install didn't shut down when I requested a restart - it needed a little push (ALT+SysRq R-S-U-B). On restart, as expected due to the grub2/Wubi problems already covered in other posts, Wubi doesn't boot (but I had to try). I ended up at a grub prompt (not a rescue prompt), which is easy to boot from. I then chose the Classic desktop to login to, and had to click on multiple "Reload" buttons to fix the broken panel objects.

Welcome to Natty!!!

Step 5 - A new Grub2 wrinkle
So the accepted fix with Wubi installs is to clean out the /boot/grub directory and regenerate grub.cfg. This does spit out one error (on 10.10) but it's not an issue - about a missing /boot/grub/video.lst. However, with Natty, now Grub checks the syntax of the grub.cfg and rejects it if it finds errors. So the empty load_video function causes a syntax error.

You can get around this by leaving video.lst in /boot/grub, but that just spits out errors and reboots your machine when trying to boot your install. So... instead you have to manually rename grub.cfg.new to grub.cfg. Alternatively you can patch /etc/grub.d/00_header. What a pain! There must be an easier way to do this!!!

The instructions to patch grub, and the new command to manually rename grub.cfg.new follow:

sudo mv /boot/grub /boot/grubold
sudo mkdir /boot/grub
sudo cp /boot/grub/grubenv /boot/grub
sudo update-grub
sudo mv /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new /boot/grub/grub.cfg

That's about it. Natty boots fine after that, apart from having to click RELOAD on all the panel objects each time. Don't forget to select the "Classic" desktop unless you have a decent test machine that can handle Unity.

PS another nice thing is the Firefox beta. It looks very similar to Chrome - which is good for Firefox.

NOTE: if you install Wubi to a partition other than Windows, there is no way to update the wubildr file that is required to boot the Wubi install. Likely the upgrade will fail as the grub.cfg file has changed radically (I haven't tested it yet, but it pays to be cautious) and my previous test showed that the Maverick wubildr did not work. There are ways to generate a new wubildr file if you need to, but that's not covered in this article.