Ubuntu update to 12.04 LTS

I tried my first automatic update of Ubuntu from 11.x to 12.04 LTS. The upgrade fails for several reasons including Ubuntu locking up in the middle of the upgrade. Several previous upgrades failed to the point of needing a complete new installation. Ubuntu upgrades are still Russian roulette.

Download

Ubuntu fits on a CD, with a maximum size of 700 Megabytes. When I started the upgrade, Ubuntu downloaded more than a Gigabyte, more than you would download if you downloaded the CD then performed an upgrade from the CD.

After the upgrade, the Ubuntu update software is downloading massive daily updates with today's update nearly 30 megabytes. This is several times more than the updates for Ubuntu 11.10 on my other computer, indicating the components in Ubuntu 12.04 are not yet stable.

Reliability

Ubuntu minor updates, the ones you run each week to apply security updates, are reliable and better than the Windows equivalent. My experience of the Windows equivalent is simple, every second or third update, Microsoft would try to install .Net components and that would crash the system. Ubuntu has never tried that.

Version upgrades, from 11.04 to 12.04 in this case, almost always fail in recent versions of Ubuntu. The upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 worked. Upgrades from 10.xto 11.x and 11.x to 12.x fail. Of all the Linux distributions, Ubuntu is now the worst at upgrades and is worse than Windows.

Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista was a shambles but not due to outright failure, the mess worked enough for you to continue but it was just too slow to use for anything practical. Recent Ubuntu upgrades are worse, you end up crashed in the middle of the upgrade with nowhere to go.

The crash

This time the crash is quiet. Nothing is happening. The screen displays the following and the disk light occasionally blinks but there is no progress indicated on the screen.

During previous upgrades, something similar happened at different points with absolutely no way to fix the problem. This time there is a secret message. You have to select the ► in front of Terminal to find out what is happening. The following is the result.

The solution, after you find the hidden problem, is to tab down to <Ok> and press enter.

Why is the problem hidden?

I can understand Ubuntu hiding the terminal window. Terminal windows were bad in 1980 when Microsoft decided to keep DOS visible in Windows. Microsoft released several versions of Windows with DOS still used for backwards compatibility. The modern GUI, Graphical User Interface, was 10 years old by the time Microsoft and Apple cloned the Xerox invention and 20 years old by the time the terminal dropped out of use in Windows.

Linux and Unix still use the terminal window for some weird reason. When a terminal window appears in windows, Unix bigots scream about the terminal windows being a DOS box and tell everyone that the terminal window in Windows is proof windows is broken. Then the same people show off the DOS box in Unix and brag about knowing how to use it.

If Ubuntu insists on using the DOS/terminal box/window, they should open it when there is a hidden message requiring a reply.

Did the upgrade fix anything?

The startup still has the same fault introduced in Ubuntu 11. At startup you get the following message then a long wait.
Waiting for network configuration

After the first message, you get the following message and a long wait.
Waiting an additional 60 seconds for network configuration

You may then see the following message pop up, if you are still awake.
Booting system without full network configuration

Did the upgrade make anything worse?

Ubuntu killed the network connection. The little network indicator in the top right corner is visible and empty.
When I place the cursor over the icon, I see the message NetworkManager is not running...
When I try to right click the icon, it says Networking disabled.

Now I have to debug Ubuntu 12.04 networks. There was never any reason to change anything in the network area. The hardware did not change. There is just one simple wired connection. The network chip in the computer has not changed for two years. Why would Ubuntu damage the settings if nothing has changed?

I went looking for tools to diagnose problems. Ubuntu 12.04 changed some of the menus and I had to look through every menu trying to find the basic system tools. Why do they make random changes to menus?

Some of the network tools complained they are not compatible with Ubuntu 12.04. Ubuntu 12.04 installed software that is not compatible with 12.04.

Stupid suggestions

I looked for ideas on how to fix the broken connection. Some of the published fixes suggested using the network to connect to Ubuntu to update software. Hmmm, use the broken network to get the fix for the broken network, how would that work?

NetworkManager is not running...

The Ubuntu network icon displays the message NetworkManager is not running.... You can start the Network manager in a variety of ways. The most common suggestion on the Web is to go back to 1980, open a DOS/terminal box/window and type in the following command. (Pretend you are using 1935 teletype to create paper tape to feed into the first electronic computer in the world (Invented by the British at Bletchley Park).)

sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager start

The result is the network system stops, not starts. You get something like the following.

Another suggestion is to use the following command to remove the Network manager state setting. A test shows it makes no difference.
sudo rm /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state

Buried down in /etc/network/ is a file named interfaces. The file contained junk. I deleted the junk and restarted Linux. Everything worked. There was no waiting message at startup. The wired network connected. Unfortunately I did not keep a copy of the junk to show you.

The following is the file on my netbook, where I am typing this article.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

The desktop with the wired connection also contains a line auto eth0. The junk was a line starting with iface eth0 or iface eth3. Whatever the number was, I removed the line starting with iface eth. The file ended up as the following.

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0

System error

A few seconds after startup, Ubuntu reports the system error described in the following link. The error is occurring in the update mechanism. Luckily the update system is still working. When the error is fixed, the update should be applied automatically. (Thats what I though would happen with the network wait error but it never occurred.)
bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aptdaemon/+bug/639616

Conclusion

Ubuntu stuffs up network connections during upgrades. The problem started several upgrades ago and continues without a fix in sight. Recent Ubuntu upgrades also have other major problems. Another Linux distribution, Linux Mint, is looking better every day.