Upgrading to (K)ubuntu Karmic: Not exactly a joyride

There were a number of reasons why I abandoned Slackware and moved to (K)ubuntu back in 2005, but the root cause for almost all of them can be condensed into a single word: Laziness. Back then I was getting weary of compiling software that was not provided by the package system and Slackware's release policy seemed a bit slow and conservative to me. Also, (K)ubuntu appeared to be something like a more bleeding-edge variant of Debian which still provided reasonably stable releases that - unlike Debian's sid distribution - could be used without fear of installing completely broken packages just by performing an upgrade at the wrong time.

Now I know that complaining about bugs in FLOSS projects is generally frowned upon, but the upgrade from Kubuntu Jaunty (9.04) to Karmic (9.10) really made me wonder whether Canonical is going a bit too far with it's tendency to go for bleeding edge versions of the software they package. So far, I've had my share of troubles with the various incarnations of Ubuntu, but this time, being hit by 3 show-stopper bugs on only 2 systems was a bit much. Let me whine about them for a second.

While booting my newly upgraded desktop system and even before the X server was up and running, I could already witness the first issue: The kernel failed to establish a working connection to my UMTS modem (a Huawei E169 / E620) and conveyed this failure by spamming the terminal with messages like ''option_instat_callback: error -108" (see bug #446146 on Canonical's Launchpad). „Great! So no internet access for now“, I thought and logged into my KDE session, or rather, what was left of it. While X11 reported that it could successfully load AMD/ATI's proprietary fglrx driver, it failed to initialize the DRI. Then the KDE session started with a dialog indicating that kwin had just crashed repeatedly and asking me to choose a different window manager (from a list containing one entry: kwin). And just as the prospect of a cozy afternoon started to dwindle away, plasma-desktop fired up – and crashed.

Not entirely satisfied by the prospect of running a desktop environment that was lacking both a working window manager and a desktop shell, I set out to try and get it into some usable state. After having read various posts on bugtrackers, forums and mailing lists, I installed a newer version of the fglrx driver (the one bundled with AMD's Catalyst 9.10 release), which solved the DRI issue and allowed kwin to run properly. After that, I fetched a working configuration for plasma-desktop (plasma-desktoprc, plasma-desktop-appletsrc) from a different user and customized it to my needs (plasma-desktop's default configuration that appears to be used when the RC files are not found in ~/.kde/share/config, crashed as well). Finally, I tried to tackle the issue with the modem using the workarounds described in the corresponding bug report - with limited success. Upgrading to a release candidate for kernel 2.6.32 would solve it, but it would also break fglrx, which does not yet support that kernel version :/ Right now the only way of making the modem work is to load the usbserial module with vendor and product id passed in explicitly, which works sometimes :/

All in all, I think it's safe to say that this was one of the most horrible distribution upgrades I've experienced thus far. I'm almost relieved that the next iteration will be a long term support release, so there is reason to hope for a more elaborate testing cycle …