I've been running Ubuntu as my main OS since last December, until today. Last night, I installed the latest update from Ubuntu, the "latest stable version" 11.10. I had some difficulty booting my computer. It said it had problems finding the network, but eventually booted and was stable enough to use for a few hours.
This morning, it never booted at all. To minimize a painful experience, the only way I could get this box to boot was to return to my Windows 7 partition. I spent the day salvaging everything I've done for the last year and moving it into the Windows partition. Thankfully, it all appears to be saved, but the Linux partition is toast and essentially unusable. Looks like I'm back to running a Windoze machine again - at least for a while.
This is kinda surprising -- Ubuntu has been doing some silly things lately, but making a computer a brink is a new one (though I've always waited 30 days after a release to upgrade, Just In Case).
ReplyDeleteThough with some of the 'features' Ubuntu has been foisting off on their clientele, I've been considering going back to a direct Debian-based system pegged on the 'testing' or 'unstable' release.
Serious. When I posted my question to Ubuntu forums about not booting with 11.10, no one else had a thread on it. Last night, there were several. Plus, I gotta say I hate that Unity interface, although that's minor.
ReplyDeleteMy Linux partition is barely usable; all the programs I installed are gone, and the video driver takes this 1920 x 1080 screen and fits it into something else so that everything is stretched horizontally. Since I already did a re-install of 11.04, I think the only thing left is to wipe that partition and start over. Which sounds like another all day thing which will have to wait for the weekend.
Thanks for the heads up. I've downloaded the 11.10 distros but will wait before upgrading (I learned my lesson on the last 'upgrade' to 11.04 -- Ubuntu wouldn't boot, I had to do a repair procedure to recover functionality... it worked, but it taught me not to trust the Ubuntu upgrade process.)
ReplyDeleteI haven't yet pulled the trigger to move to Linux as my main OS. I run Ubuntu 11.04 as an Oracle VirtualBox client OS under a Win7 host (my development system), so I can roll back to previous stable versions when I need to -- now there's a feature...
BTW, you can get rid of the Unity interface -- you can get back to the original (Gnome?) interface when you log in. I did it, and I've never looked back.
ReplyDeleteInstructions
The Unity interface is funky if you are a longtime user.
As a UI programmer, I understand the value of not foisting radical UI changes on a large user base. Interface stability has value, and should not be abandoned without good reason.