My Upgrade to Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn

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I don’t tend to get excited when new versions of Linux distributions are released, but I do try to pay some attention to the distributions that I run. This time, though, I managed to completely miss the release of Ubuntu 14.10.

I had some free time over the weekend, so I decided to upgrade my desktop. It was exactly the kind of upgrade I like: the kind of upgrade where nothing went seriously wrong, and I almost can’t tell the difference.

I was lazy this time, and I didn’t bother to remove the xorg-edgers PPA before the upgrade. If you’re using the xorg-edgers PPA, you still might want to roll back those packages before you upgrade from 14.04. I knew what might break, and I know how to manually fix things when they do, so it was worth the roll of the dice to me.

I didn’t notice any changes, but your mileage may vary

I don’t run any of the usual desktop environments. I use the Sawfish window manager along with some components from XFCE. Everything tends to look and function exactly the same between upgrades for me. Just about the worst thing I ever have to deal with is recompiling Sawfish, but that only happens every couple of years.

I’m sure there’s all sorts of changes if you’re running the default Unity desktop.

Waiting for network configuration

This message was the only oddity I’ve experienced since upgrading to Ubuntu 14.10. During boot, a message that reads “Waiting for network configuration…” appears, and the system sits there waiting for quite some time. Then another message appears that reads “Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration…” appears.

I found some solutions on askubuntu.com. The best answer there is almost certainly to make sure that your /etc/network/interfaces file is configured correctly. Unfortunately for me, mine is set up exactly the way I want it. My computer is set up to request a DHCP address on a bridge device instead of the eth0 device, and this seems to confuse the new boot process in Utopic Unicorn.

I ended up using the more heavy-handed fix. I commented out all the sleep commands in the /etc/init/failsafe.conf file.

/etc/init/failsafe.conf
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# failsafe

description "Failsafe Boot Delay"
author "Clint Byrum <clint@ubuntu.com>"

start on filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=lo
stop on static-network-up or starting rc-sysinit

emits failsafe-boot

console output

script
        # Determine if plymouth is available
        if [ -x /bin/plymouth ] && /bin/plymouth --ping ; then
                PLYMOUTH=/bin/plymouth
        else
                PLYMOUTH=":"
        fi

    # The point here is to wait for 2 minutes before forcibly booting 
    # the system. Anything that is in an "or" condition with 'started 
    # failsafe' in rc-sysinit deserves consideration for mentioning in
    # these messages. currently only static-network-up counts for that.

##       sleep 20

    # Plymouth errors should not stop the script because we *must* reach
    # the end of this script to avoid letting the system spin forever
    # waiting on it to start.
        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting for network configuration..." || :
##       sleep 40

        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration..." || :
##       sleep 59
        $PLYMOUTH message --text="Booting system without full network configuration..." || :

    # give user 1 second to see this message since plymouth will go
    # away as soon as failsafe starts.
        sleep 1
    exec initctl emit --no-wait failsafe-boot
end script

post-start exec logger -t 'failsafe' -p daemon.warning "Failsafe of 120 seconds reached."

This is not the optimal solution, but it is much better than waiting an extra two minutes for my computer to reboot.

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