It’s not really that I don’t trust the release crew to get it right, it’s more about wanting to let the storm of downloads, patches, reviews, comments and advice settle before I take the risk (however small) of being without a machine for a day.

I’ll usually download and seed the torrent and I’ll happy upgrade any number of virtual machines but I’m a bit more cautious when it comes to my primary development machine.

So I was going rather against type yesterday when I downloaded 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (also known as AMD64 Jaunty Jackalope) and followed the instructions on http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

The first thing an Ubuntu upgrade process asks you about is whether or not you want to include updates from the internet.

I usually say “no” because I want to upgrade as fast as possible and don’t want to be tied to download speeds. I’m upgrading from the CD so the network won’t be used then, right? Upgrade shouldn’t take too long then, right?

So why do I see this:

Why is it going to take 4 hours to upgrade my machine from a CD? And what’s with the 62.2kB/s?

The first time I upgraded an Ubuntu installation I assumed  I’d misread the question but it’s consistently done that on all upgrades since. Why?

Yesterday, during the four hours I had to muse this, I finally worked out what’s going on.

The release CD contains a complete core Ubuntu install with the latest version of all the packages that form that core. However when you run the package manager you see that there are over 26,000 software packages that form part of this release. They’re not all on that CD! However a specific version of each of them is associated with any given release of Ubuntu.

A well known example of this was OpenOffice. OpenOffice 3.0 was released just before Ubuntu 8.10 came out last year. There were a lot of people asking for it to be included in the 8.10 release but The Powers That Be decided that it was too new and untested to slip in at the last minute and Ubuntu 8.10 shipped with OpenOffice 2.4.1 instead. At no point in the following 6 months was OpenOffice rolled out as an upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 – new features don’t get updated in existing released versions of Ubuntu, only security patches and bug fixes get sent out like that. Development of OpenOffice continues independently and, when the next version of Ubuntu is being planned, a current (or fairly current) version of OpenOffice is taken for inclusion.

OpenOffice is just one of many pieces of software that are controlled through the Ubuntu package manager and in a way it’s a bad example because it’s physically included on the release CD. But most of those 26,000 packages listed in the package manager are NOT on that CD. If I choose to install (say) the Netbeans development environment, the package manager has to download it from the internet. If I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 I will be given Netbeans 6.1 and it’ll stay at 6.1 (plus bug fixes and security issues) forever. However Ubuntu 9.04 contains a more recent version of Netbeans – version 6.5. So when I upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, the upgrade process has to go fetch that new copy of Netbeans as it’s performing my upgrade. And it has to do this for hundreds of other packages I’ve installed which aren’t on the CD. And it has to do this at exactly the same time that thousands of other people are running the Ubuntu upgrade and doing the same thing!

So NOW I finally understand why my Ubuntu upgrade always has to hit the internet and I finally understand why it’s so slow. The package manager is a wonderful system and I think I can put up with a four hour upgrade given all the other wonderful things it gives me.

I should have been playing with it for quite a while now but I don’t have a physical machine that I wanted to dedicate to the task and the alpha releases were known not to work in Virtual Box (my virtual PC software of choice).

The beta release fixed that problem so I loaded it up a month ago… looks nice.

However the Guest Additions in Virtual Box 1.6.6 didn’t work properly with it… so I was limited to a small screen and a mouse that got ‘captured’ by the window everytime I went and clicked in there. Not exactly encouraging me to investigate it further.

Simultaneously, Virtual Box got an upgrade to version 2. Major new feature: the ability to host 64-bit guests – the previous versions could only run 32-bit guests, even if your host machine was 64-bit.

As with any major new release, Virtual Box 2.0.0 appeared to have a couple of issues and it wasn’t clear whether the first bug-fix release, 2.0.2, had cleared them all up. I’m in the middle of two high-workload Java courses at the moment and I use a Virtual Box virtual machine for testing that my homework deploys correctly before I submit it so I couldn’t afford any downtime.. if I upgraded to version 2 it had to work. So of course I restrain those eager fingers and keep working with the setup that keeps working.

Meanwhile I’ve been keeping my virtual copy of Ubuntu 8.10 patched and up to date on a daily basis. It’s been very interesting watching all the patches come along – sometimes as many as 100MB in a single day.

And then they stopped. As of (I think) the end of Monday I don’t think I’ve seen any new patches. Sounds to me like they’re finished! Yes, I know release isn’t until Friday but the Release Candidate was last Friday and you don’t expect to be throwing out changes to that right up to the wire. So I think that what we’ve got now is probably the Real Deal.

Wooo-hooo!

Last night I stopped by the Virtual Box website… 2.0.4 just released with more bug-fixes and support for Ubuntu 8.10. I couldn’t resist. As you can probably tell I’m writing this in 8.10 under Virtual Box right now.

Yes the new GIMP made it in, no the new Open Office didn’t. You don’t need me to run down all the new features – there’s lots of info out there, but some items of interest include

• The new network manager. Hopefully I’ll find it easier to work with than the old one.
• The guest session. Creates a new Home directory in /tmp and switches to that without logging you out – great for passing your machine to someone else when you’re still in the middle of doing something.
• Personal encrypted directory. Sounds interesting but haven’t played with it yet.
• New Pidgin. I’m a big Pidgin user for chat and IRC so I’m looking forward to the new version. For a time there was talk of replacing it as the default chat client in this release. One cute feature – it integrates into the user-switcher applet.
• New Samba. I always have issues with Windows file sharing – I know it’s actually easy but it never seems to be that way for me. Hopefully this will make my life easier.
• And of course new Gnome, X and kernels. Should all help to make this the most user-friendly and stable release yet.

In some ways it’s very pleasant but in some ways it’s slightly underwhelming. And that’s a good thing. There’s no smack-you-in-the-face major change to the desktop, just lots of things that’ll make your life easier and more robust.

I’m really looking forward to upgrading my desktop for real… I just need to find a time when I can afford to possibly be without a computer for half a day – not that I expect that to happen… just that I’d rather err on the side of caution. And my schedule suggests that that won’t be until the beginning of December. I don’t think I can wait that long!