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Pjr
Don't Panic
join:2005-12-11
UK

Pjr

Member

Upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC

Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC.

Canonical says it is working to fix a problem that's crippling some Ubuntu PCs after they've been upgraded to the latest version of the Linux distro.

A spokesperson for the company told The Reg it is aware of a "small number" of "power users" are seeing their PCs crash following the move to 14.04.

Until there's a fix, the spokesperson said: "Users who find themselves in this situation can recover by means of booting from a live CD or USB stick and reinstalling the boot loader on the master boot records of all their fixed disks."

...

According to one Reg reader who has been in contact – and those manning Ubuntu forums, see here and here – the upgrade breaks the GRUB bootloader, rendering the machine unbootable.

Woops.

How did that slip past quality control? They do have some form of QC, don't they?

darcilicious
Cyber Librarian
Premium Member
join:2001-01-02
Forest Grove, OR

darcilicious

Premium Member

Because it's actually impossible to test for every possible situation.

nwrickert
Mod
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL

nwrickert to Pjr

Mod

to Pjr
said by Pjr:

How did that slip past quality control?

It's hard to test upgrading.

You can test once. But then you have to reinstall the older version, to test upgrading again. You are more likely to just test upgrading from the beta to the release candidate, but that is not the same thing.

Clean installs are tested more thoroughly than upgrades, because of this problem.

Pjr
Don't Panic
join:2005-12-11
UK

Pjr to darcilicious

Member

to darcilicious
said by darcilicious:

Because it's actually impossible to test for every possible situation.

Allowing users to run beta versions means that software is tested under more situations than might otherwise be possible.

If you didn't bother reading the Launchpad bug report linked in the Reg article I'll quote it for you:

Ubuntu 14.04 Update breaks grub, resulting in "error: symbol 'grub_term_highlight_color' not found"
...
Reported by Mathias Dietrich on 2014-03-09

It's been 6 or 7 weeks since the first reports and the devs are arguing with the users over whether it's a problem with the installer or pebcak on the users' part.

In the end it is down to the Ubuntu devs to fix the updater so users, regardless of the state of Grub before the update, get a working OS. Otherwise what's the use of the updater?

Saying things like

dan, there is no change we can make to grub to prevent this from happening if grub-pc/install_devices is not set correctly. Unless you can show that the installer does not set it correctly, then there is nothing we can do.

doesn't inspire confidence in me. Nothing they can do? How about a check to see if grub-pc/install_devices is set correctly? Or how about allowing Grub to do it's thing and install from scratch?

As I said QC doesn't seem very important if they think users having to repair Grub after an update is a sign of quality.

rchandra
Stargate Universe fan
Premium Member
join:2000-11-09
14225-2105
ARRIS ONT1000GJ4
EnGenius EAP1250

1 recommendation

rchandra to Pjr

Premium Member

to Pjr
a few thoughts on upgrading to a new release:

1.) Back up, preferrably doing something like Clonezilla so that if it doesn't go well, you can get back to roughly the state you were in before the upgrade. In other words, treat a release-to-release upgrade like it was a disk failure, because sometimes upgrading critical parts like the bootloader will introduce bugs. Yes, you can try a few things like fixing GrUB once the upgrade is complete so that maybe you don't have to restore (and undo the upgrade), but at least you'll have a fallback position.

2.) If resources and time permit, practice a bare metal restore (of your e.g. Clonezilla backup) onto a spare drive. If it doesn't go well, and you can't use your backup, it's not much good to you. If you don't have a spare, they're not super expensive, so you might want to consider buying one to have in case your main one fails. That way it's ready for recovery, less delay in acquiring one, if it does fail.

3.) If it's a system you can't live without (well, if that's so, it's probably has an LTS release), wait a few months for the point release. By default, IIRC, LTS upgrades aren't even offered until then. Let the enthusiasts take the proverbial arrows in their backs.
rchandra

1 recommendation

rchandra to nwrickert

Premium Member

to nwrickert
depends.

You can try upgrading in a virtual machine which supports snapshots, and then just revert to the snapshot or don't apply the changes, according to how your virtual machine works. A lot of them have that capability.

It almost never hurts to have an image (e.g. Clonezilla) backup. Restoring an image will likely take less time, maybe lots less time, than reinstalling.

nwrickert
Mod
join:2004-09-04
Geneva, IL

nwrickert

Mod

Sure, but it is still a lot of effort.

Most of the testing is done by volunteers. Unless someone is beating the drums toward testing updates, few will do that during the test phase.

I see the same thing with opensuse (which I use and test). Most of the install bugs are worked out before the release, but the update bugs show up later, when it is a bit late to fix.

Maxo
Your tax dollars at work.
Premium Member
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL

Maxo to Pjr

Premium Member

to Pjr
Post should be titled "Upgrading any operating system may knacker your PC" That's a given.
I got bit a bug on my work laptop while upgrading. If you have tex-live installed the upgrade will fail. Fortunately I was able to recover from the problem by removing a bunch of stuff with dpkg and then reinstalling them after the upgrade.
I have upgraded about twenty machines so far. Only a few gave me problems but all booted to a stable Ubuntu 14.04 once I was done. (One I fubared myself after the upgrade.)

Tirael
BOHICA
Premium Member
join:2009-03-18
Sacramento, CA

Tirael to Pjr

Premium Member

to Pjr
It looks like to me (just from reading the comments on the Launchpad bug) that whenever a user upgrades to 14.04, it is using one of the newer versions of grub, which doesn't have the grub_term_highlight_color function. The upgrade is not changing the /etc/default/grub file, so when update-grub is ran, it generates the grub.cfg with a call to that function, which would cause grub to fail on boot.

The simple fix is to completely remove grub (apt-get purge grub) and reinstall the newest version from the repos. If that doesn't work, then it means there is a bug in the version which 14.04 is using (which is a beta version no less).

Further reading suggests that I am correct (comment #115). I ran into a similar problem with grub on Debian Jessie, so I upgraded to the Sid version of grub to fix it.

Maxo
Your tax dollars at work.
Premium Member
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL

Maxo

Premium Member

That is curious. Usually, during an upgrade, if the conf file is not stock then it will prompt the user. Samba and Apache2 definitely do this. I wonder why the same is not true for Samba.

Santa Fe
BUT.....I Digress!

join:2000-08-22
Freight Yard

Santa Fe to Tirael

to Tirael
Weird. I upgraded Xubuntu from 13.10 to 14.04 & didn't get this. The upgrade booted normally upon reboot. Wonder if Xubuntu isn't using the newer Grub version and that's why the 13.10 config file worked in 14.04?

Maxo
Your tax dollars at work.
Premium Member
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL

Maxo

Premium Member

said by Santa Fe:

Weird. I upgraded Xubuntu from 13.10 to 14.04 & didn't get this. The upgrade booted normally upon reboot. Wonder if Xubuntu isn't using the newer Grub version and that's why the 13.10 config file worked in 14.04?

It is some edge case the spawns the problem. I have updated a lot of machine from 13.10 to 14.04 and none of them exhibited this issue.

rchandra
Stargate Universe fan
Premium Member
join:2000-11-09
14225-2105
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EnGenius EAP1250

rchandra to Santa Fe

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to Santa Fe
I much prefer to have green letters instead of white/grey on a black background for my GrUB menu, along with the highlight (black on green). So it looks from this discussion like, if I upgrade, it will likewise break/fail.

It doesn't seem like this would be particularly tough to implement; set the attribute byte(s) while writing to the screen buffer. Why the powers that be decided this needed to be removed, or even disturbed, I have NO idea.