Upgrade to ubuntu 10.10 - a nightmare

You can read about the grub_xputs not found error  which I encountered during my upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10 in my previous blog entry.

My Ubuntu Story

I began using ubuntu with 7.04. For upto ubuntu 9.04 and part of 9.10 I was running Ubuntu on a dual boot desktop machine with XP. I bought a laptop in jan 2010 and decide to drop windows as by that time I was comfortable with Linux alone. I started on my laptop with 9.10 which worked pretty decently and did not cause me much problem.

Then Ubuntu 10.04 LTS came. Seeing the great positive feed back I upgraded my system to Lucid and my most productive machine was born. I installed kubuntu and edubuntu together with ubuntu and every single program was working like a charm.I could easily run a windows 7 using Virtualbox along with the Linux in full swing. Kubuntu was working alongside Ubuntu perfectly with almost no error at all.

My Ubuntu Horror Story 
 
Then the disaster upgrade came in the shape of Ubuntu 10.10. I upgraded using the inbuilt tools and had no live cd with me. When I finally boot the system up using the method I described in my previous post I found my system almost normal.The problem began when I started playing an HD media file.




About 10 minutes in to the film the system began to freeze in between. It froze when ever I clicked some link or tried to open or close a window. Navigation was almost impossible. I somehow restarted but the problem persisted. Within 10 minutes of booting up system froze  randomly.

I checked the amount of memory Ubuntu 10.10 was taking which was only about 160MB in my 3GB laptop also CPU was never used above 30%. Then "Why so slow??".

I first checked for any update but update manager told me that the system is up-to-date then I started searching the net for a possible solution but nobody was able to correctly point out why the problem occurred.

One thing I learned from that search is that people with more than double my system strength was also having the problem. So the problem is of the software not my machine. Then I began searching for a way for downgrading my system from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 so sad there was no way I could downgrade a system.

I then decided to install a fresh copy of Ubuntu Lucid but before that I had to move all the files from my home folder along with the software settings. I gradually copied all my files using my slowy dewey system to an external drive(which took me about 2hrs to copy 17GB) and installed a new Lucid system. Everything was back to normal.

But now I had only one OS instead of the three present earlier all the softwares were gone and I had to download all files once again to make my system functional as it was before.
All that given by the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 was 36 hrs of misery.