Greg Hudson’s MIT blog

I’m working under Ubuntu 7.04 now.  In the past I had difficulty installing it on my 17″ Macbook Pro, but I worked past that.  (Problem: the Live CD tries to use a non-encumbered graphics driver which black-screens and freezes upon starting the X server.  If you specify a resolution at install time, the X server instead crashes on startup, giving you access to a text console from which you can install and configure the encumbered fglrx package.)

It’s good except gnome-terminal appears to be buggy (has some rendering errors from time to time, which go away when you force a redraw) and occasionally text gets pasted or other mysterious things happen when I don’t want them to.  I think the latter may be due to the trackpad support causing mouse events when I do something ham-handed to the keyboard; I have yet to figure out exactly what I’m doing to cause it.  Oh, and Firefox sometimes freezes up after Flash content is displayed.
I was reminded recently that Ubuntu is not a no-brainer choice over Debian, so I thought about that a bit.  I looked over some of Bill Cattey’s Linux survey data in greater detail (it’s still not ready for release) and determined that in fact, Ubuntu does appear to have a larger user community than Debian at MIT, so I’m still comfortable with that direction.  I have some specific concerns about Debian as opposed to Ubuntu:

• It tends to have a long release cycle, which in turn often encourages people to use less stable variants in order to have access to modern software.
• Its purist approach would force us to do more work assembling the encumbered components needed to make it work acceptably to users.  (That’s my impression, anyway.)

So, what does an automated RHEL to Ubuntu upgrade look like?  The package manager isn’t going to do the job, so it has to be done at the file level (although the package managers can be used on each end to assemble a list of files that need to be considered).  Athena has past experience with file-level OS upgrades; we did them with BSD Unix, Ultrix, and Solaris.

We had enough problems with Solaris OS upgrades that we eventually started doing them from a miniroot installed in the swap partition rather than trying to do them while the target system is booted and running.  I’m not sure if we want to invent that machinery for Linux; it’s harder to do on PC hardware and it wasn’t a trivial amount of work on Sun hardware.  It might be easier to just work around the problems of doing a live upgrade for this one-time occurrance.