Soooo, for the last several days my main desktop system, recently installed with Xubuntu 9.10, has come up without networking services. The eth0 network interface is there, the (static!) IP is correct, Web browsing works… but NFS shares aren’t mounted and, upon poking around, other vital system services weren’t started.
Worse, networking can’t be manually started, either, and there are no diagnostic log messages.
Sometimes rebooting helps, sometimes it doesn’t. The problem is definitely timing-related, so sometimes pausing before signing in makes it work. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Come to find out that Karmic has revised how system services get started during boot. The intricacies are lost on me, but the old Unix-style /etc/init.d/ model is now obsolete. Documentation on upstart, the replacement, is sketchy at best.
We’re to type sudo service mumble start|stop|restart when we want to do things manually. Oh, maybe only start and stop have been implemented; everything else is defunct, but you can’t use the old method, either.
Except that something in upstart 0.6.3-11 is broken / different, to the extent that system services no longer start up properly. Evidently that upgrade happened here in the very recent past, part of the usual system update routine. I do this manually, but there wasn’t any heads-up notice mentioning “Oh, by the way, this update will kill your system”, so I just installed it.
Downgrading to -10 resolves the problem for many people, not including me, but that is not regarded as an actual fix. The older version has similar problems and downgrading just pushes the symptoms somewhere else. Part of the problem is that logging doesn’t (seem to) happen from upstart for any of the affected services.
Now, Linux distributions started as a way to bottle up various combinations of upstream programs in known-good configurations, so that we end-user types didn’t have to go through the Linux From Scratch effort. That model seems largely dead; each major distro now applies so much floobydust to their combination that any resemblance to the upstream programs is purely coincidental.
Like, for example, did you know that you’re probably not running OpenOffice, but Go-OO? Never heard of it? Me, either. Do the obvious search and see what you’ve not been told. Hint: Mono is still optional.
Long ago, in a universe far away, I actually enjoyed beta testing software. These days, I just want it to work; I have other things to do. It’s painfully obvious that Windows isn’t the answer, but it’s becoming evident that (at least) Ubuntu has lost sight of the “it just works” goal.
When vital parts of the system (like, for example, networking and system service startup) Just Don’t Work, something has gone badly wrong in the distro’s QA process. Yes, some problems remain hard to find, but when they’re reported (by other folks; I’m not first in line by any means) something should happen muy pronto.
When a desktop environment (like, for example) KDE can’t handle two independent monitors, but has all manner of glitzy 3D effects, the development effort has wandered off into the bushes of irrelevancy. The fact that KDE can claim to have fixed 10,000 bugs in the 4.3 release is not, to my mind, much to brag about.
To quote the immortal Iphigenia Deme, “That’s obscene-gerund enough!”
Right now, I have a column to finish and ship, with another right behind. With any luck, this system will hang together long enough to get those done, at which point I must devote some time to finding out which, if any, distros have a better recent track record.
Some early fiddling indicates Arch Linux, which is sort of like Linux From Scratch with bigger and sorta-kinda snap-together pieces, should do the trick. Most important: it’s agnostic with respect to which desktop environment you pick, unlike the GNOME-oriented Ubuntu chassis that sorta-kinda allows you to bolt on KDE or Xubuntu bodywork.
Quick summary of what’s needed: separate X sessions, right-hand session on a rotated-to-portrait monitor, Wacom tablet pinned to the left monitor, left- and right-handed trackballs. This configuration was fine in Kubuntu 8.04, got flaky in 8.10, and fell apart after that.
There may well be upstream problems with some of those pieces, which generally isn’t something a distro can fix. I contend they could better apply their resources to fixing such problems than screwing up something else.
More to follow…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Or OS X.
FWIW I use Mepis, a derivative of Debian (currently), and while it doesn’t include the latest-and-greatest, as a consequence of being Debian-based, it seems to have a minimum of floobydust. The problems I’ve had with upgrades have all been because of flaky hardware.
Of course, the downside is that if something does go wrong there are about 1/1000 as many people who can answer questions — but you’ll run into the same issue with Arch, I think.
I’m really sorry to hear that Ubuntu is being so horrible for you. I’d been thinking about transitioning over there, and you’ve halted that line of thinking.
I think Ubuntu works just fine for “standard” PCs: mainstream components with nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, I just managed to get a friend with a rather old and thoroughly compromised Windows box to (at least) try Kubuntu; he finally gave up trying to remove a Trojan rootkit.
The further you get from the standard-PC ideal, the less well Ubuntu fits in. Pretty nearly everything that’s gone wrong has been due to my bizarre set of hardware and preferences.
Apart from that little upstart inconvenience…
The Arch Linux principle boils down to “Broken? You have all the pieces, so fix it yourself” and, given that I was doing pretty much exactly that with Ubuntu, I think clearing off some distro cruft can only improve the situation.
We shall see.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve always been infinitely perplexed why anyone would ever even think about “upgrading” a system that’s working (outside of applying a very small number of specific security patches for known vulnerabilities which actually affect you). I mean, you wouldn’t rip up a perfectly fine PCB and reroute it just for kicks, and if you did, you’d expect some breakage afterwards as par for the course, so why would you think you could get away with it on something that’s a few million times more complex?
Although software doesn’t wear out, it does become obsolete. I’d been using Xubuntu 8.04 up until the tail end of 2009, when it was nigh onto a year and a half old. They backport security fixes, but the apps don’t get updated hardly at all… and 18 months is a long time in app years!
So I didn’t do any upgrades for all that time, watching in bemusement as everybody got excited over all the alphas and betas and RCs and releases.
So then I updated to 8.10, which was a year old at the time, but it had, shall we say, issues. When 9.10 stabilized (after a few months), I figured that it might solve the problems I’d been having with 8.10. Wrong.
What it boils down to is that I upgraded the OS to get improved apps, only to discover that the OS basically doesn’t work for my peculiar combination of hardware and requirements.
It’s possible to do app upgrades piecemeal and by hand for each app, but I’d rather have it all done automagically: dependency hell is very real and very deadly.
I heartily agree with you on the hardware side, though: the box stays closed unless and until something breaks. I do not tinker around with the innards!
Yeah, I still don’t get it. (a) if you’d been running Windows or MacOS, you’d never in a million years think that upgading the OS was the right way to get newer versions of your apps. (b) I can’t imagine any app for which 18 months is a long time, or for that matter, any app “upgrade” that would be worth the hassles you’ve been through. Of course, (c), you’re talking to someone whose main machine is running Slackware 3.6.0 and a kernel built in 1999…
That, of course, is the problem I bought into by using Ubuntu in the first place. The tradeoff for a more-or-less stable system (their LTS schedule is, what, three years?) is that they don’t mess with the big chunks. Stability Is Good.
With that in mind, however:
a) Untrue, at least for large values of “new”. Current Windows apps seem to not support anything prior to XP, so if you want a newer version of that app, you’re going to need not only Win7 but a new PC to stick under it. Ditto for Macs; their app backwards compatibility doesn’t extend to, say, the Ur-Macintosh. Heck of an upgrade path.
b) I’ll admit links hasn’t changed much over the years, but Firefox & Chrome are coming along nicely. OpenOffice, bless its pointy little head, is improving like crazy. Even the venerable Lyx, my hammer of choice for long docs, is becoming more usable. Imagination only takes you so far…
c) I certainly draw the usability-vs-futzing line a lot further to the left than you do, even though my ladies think I’m nuts for the fiddling I do!
Tip o’ the hat for the Slackware thing. I built a big picture frame for Mary’s folks using some hand-hammered Slackware and a gutted laptop, and had a good time doing it. Thing’s still running and ought to continue that way until the capacitors dry out…