Ubuntu Upgrade Fail
November 4th, 2008
When I finally got around to upgrading my Ubuntu install to 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”) earlier this week, I ran into an issue with my keyboard. Yeap. My keyboard.
My left-arrow key no longer worked. My right arrow-key didn’t work. My up-arrow key became Print-screen. The first thing I did was hit the Ubuntu forums, where I found about a dozen “solutions” which either didn’t work or were just plain hacks. I finally found one that worked for me:
- Open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist with your favorite text editor. Make sure you open it up with root privileges.
- Add the following line into that file. Save, close, and reboot.
blacklist evdev
Apparently, this was a known issue in the release candidate, but they went ahead and did a general availability release by just documenting a temporary solution in a forum. Breaking keyboard functionality (it worked perfectly in 8.04) is not the way to win new users, especially when the distribution is billed as user-friendly. I’d rather they push their release date back than have a show-stopper like this make it’s way out the door.
January 10th, 2009 at 4:03 am
I had the same, a few weeks ago. It made me feel stupid. I couldn’t figure out how to get my keyboard working. Definitely not an advertisement to newcomers.
The “solution” you found is way to low-level for the average Ubuntu user (like me).
Let’s hope this is an exceptional fail…
January 14th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Is it me, or have the last couple of Ubuntu releases been sent out into the world before they were actually ready? It’s like Canonical isn’t even paying much attention to the quality of their releases.
I’m very tempted to leave this distribution if they keep this up. I already find the addition of PulseAudio while it’s still in only Alpha stages as the default sound server was a bad move, and I find Intrepid to be the buggiest and leat stable/reliable release yet.
Like the fact that Raising Elephants no longer works in Intrepid, which means in the event that Intrepid completely crashes, the most you can do is everything but the boot stage, which requires a hard reset on the part of the user. BAD.