Ubuntu 21.04 ‘Hirsute Hippo’

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What’s New in Ubuntu 21.04 ‘Hirsute Hippo’

 

Good first impression. Unlike LTS, recognised my WiFi 6 adapter!

 

Took for a spin after a long break from Linux desktop. Pretty awesome on my m15. All hardware works out of the box. Smooth. Optimus works, and battery life is much better than on Windoze out of the box, even without undervolting. Undervolting seems to be working too. Things like Netflix and Spotify work. Time to celebrate Windows 11, by migrating away from bloated MS spyware..

Only snag with Live CD is Ubuntu Software doesn't work, not a big deal.

 

On my XPS 13 which came with Ubuntu 20.04, it keeps prompting me to upgrade to 21, I hit upgrade, nothing happens. Tried rebooting but still no luck. Not sure what to do.

@jclausius

 

Anything in Logs?

You can also try updating and upgrading from the command line.

https://www.makeuseof.com/update-ubuntu-command-line/

I would backup first though, which begs the question: what's the best way to backup the entire Linux volume, a'la Macrium Reflect which doesn't support Linux I believe.

Edit: good discussion here https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/506064/create-an-image-of-the-partition-only-the-used-space

Dd and clonezilla look like good imaging options.

 

Problem! Proprietary Nvidia driver is not working..

I installed the 460 driver as per the below

https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.ph...ia-driver-switch-between-intel-nvidia-ubuntu/

-prime-select query returns nvidia

But 'Nvidia Settings' window is empty, and nvidia-smi complains it cannot communicate with the driver. A few fps in Heaven benchmark on extreme preset.

Any ideas? I'm running in a live session, perhaps that's what's causing the issue?

 

Are you still in this state with Ubuntu? If you still want to go to 21.04, first make a known good backup of your system.

1) Open a prompt, and run:
"sudo apt-get update" # without the quotes

2) assuming this runs successfully, next run:
"sudo apt-get upgrade" # again, without the quotes

Those steps will do a command line upgrade of your system.

 

Nope, I wiped Linux, I hate it to death man!

I tried installing Wine because I need to use a text replacement app called PhaseExpress. I followed the instructions to the dot, copy/pasting many lines of commands then after all was done. Nothing was installed. Screw this OS which requires an engineering degree in coding to install a basic app.

Another thing I hated is every thing I want to do needs a freakin' password. Lile seriously, I'm all into security and stuff but this is way too much. Needing a password to change the date then within seconds prompting me for a password to check for software updates. Heck, if I wanted to go to the restroom it would ask me for a password.

@Mr. Fox @kojack @Papusan

Microshaft can track me all they want just let me stay away from this half baked OS.

 

sorry to hear that, but I understand. There are certain compromises you make with the OS. Hopefully MS will get their act together so you don't even have to give this a second thought in your case.

>> "Heck, if I wanted to go to the restroom it would ask me for a password." - LOL!!

 

Sorry to hear that.

FYI A 10 second google produced a likely solution to the sudo password issue:

https://vitux.com/how-to-disable-the-sudo-password-in-linux-mint-20-and-ubuntu-linux/

Wine is not really part of the OS, you can't reasonably blame Linux for not running Windows software.
If you have some hard Windows dependencies Wine doesn't solve, and you don't want to or cannot run them in a VM then that's it.

To call Linux half-baked is simply ridiculous though, given that the entire Web runs on it, including MS's Azure services allegedly.

The price of freedom from Windoze is that the technical bar for the user is definitely higher. You don't need an engineering agree, but you do need to know some basics (and manage your own expectations) to have a good experience. As always, enthusiasm and can-do attitude definitely help, and Prof Google is at your service

BTW the choice of distro can also weigh on your experience, e. g. Pop!_OS desktop seems more polished than bare Ubuntu.

 

The password is a Linux equivalent of Windows' super-annoying UAC feces prompt (which I disable during the initial OS setup). However, having to enter a sudo password occurs less frequently for me than the annoying UAC prompt in Windows. Plus, I use an extremely insecure 4-digit password (all 4 digits are the same) because I don't care about security. So, I can strike the same key 4 times a lot faster for a sudo password than I can dismiss UAC's nag-o-rama pop-up nonsense.

Other than some of my Windows software not having a functional equivalent on Linux, I find Linux to be a far more robust, configurable, pleasant and aesthetically appealing OS than Windows 10. The jury is still out, but it is not looking promising that I will be willing to make any concessions for Windows 11's functional inadequacies and aesthetic atrocities. So far, it seems like Windows 11 is on the fast track to become Micro$lop's 21st Century failure equivalent of Windows ME. They had already pretty well screwed the pooch with 20H2 and 21H1 functionality downgrades, and Windows 11 may be the final nail in the Windoze coffin for me.

 

Why would they? They have hundreds of millions of non-technical human products a.k.a. "users" more or less eagerly standing ready to be exploited. The direction of travel is clear.

 

Part of the problem is they do not have "customers" that purchase Windows. They have "partners" that drink their Kool-Aid and push whatever crap they tell them to, and they have "end-users" (victims) that have to put up with the crap. Some don't know anything and consider themselves successful in finding the power button. Some know everything there is to know. There are lots of end-users in the middle. They don't care what any of them think or want. Their partners are puppets that have a job to do, get paid to do it, don't care how it turns out, and if the end-users don't like it they can blame Micro$lop. Good luck finding a partner puppet that isn't drinking the wee-wee flavored Kool-Aid.

Then we have the one-off exceptions, like System76. A breath of fresh air, but a lone voice crying in the wilderness. A tiny drop of fresh, clean water in a digital cesspool.

 

The system had its ups and downs, but - in retrospect - it wasn't too bad in the XP-Win 7 era. The problem is that with Win 10 they radically changed course in an attempt to chase Apple and Google. As a result, the product then known as Windows died, and an ugly hybrid was born and confusingly given the same name. As a result, with latest "Windows", us (now the end-products, rather than end-users) are getting the worst of both worlds - progressively dumbed and locked down core OS with increasingly more intrusive online overlays and mutations penetrating the system at ever deeper levels.

With Linux though, we get that pure OS, which is free in a much broader and deeper sense than "free" Windows updates. A free Windows update is kind of like a zero down payment credit purchase: it's free to sign up for, but the resulting significant debt has to be repaid over time through the ever more profound surrender of privacy and freedom.

 

Welcome to the realization that windows IS the best OS. All this tin foil hat garbage that a few are spewing here is nonsense.

 

Linux will be the same till you become a grand-parent. I stopped using Wine after 1.6 update which ruined most old apps or games I played/used during XP era and the apps ran only 1 out 10 times. I stopped playing catch up and always use Win 10 Home/Pro along with Ubuntu on laptops/PC which plays nice. I hate Ngreedia BGA on Linux never worked once out of the box even with proprietary garbage drivers 430.x, 450. xx, 460.xx etc.. I stopped using Nvidia and switched to Intel iGPU which doesn't black screen when screen goes off or sleeps.
Another thing to note is Dell's or AW's BIOS/firmware is utter garbage as well on Linux usually messes up the sleep states, power throttling etc...

 

I think you could have left it right there and still been just as accurate.

 

There's a time and place for any OS and Linux is great at things that Windows isn't and Windows being a mainstream option vs Apple for most apps. Apple is based on *nix anyway but, the org focuses on locking things down a bit and charging a premium for its GUI / apps.

*nix systems are the backbone when it comes to performance of HW due to the lightweight footprint it possesses.
- Firewalls
- Routers
- Servers

Windows / Apple
- End Users
- App$


*nix works great if you put in some effort to understand it. This comes with time and experimenting with the functions of the underlying system and how things integrate with each other. Blindly applying changes usually results in problems as some "core" things tie to so many other features. If you need a GUI keeping an eye on the programs being installed / removed for "****desktop" being removed is a good place to start. This controls your GUI / desktop appearing when you start the machine. A desktop isn't required to function as a system though and uses in which you're using it for a FW / Router it isn't needed as most of the configuration for these situations is command line driven through various files that are text based. For Server applications you could go GUI / headless depending on how you're using the "PC".

The learning curve with *nix though is steep even coming from Mac OS if you don't dive into the command line. Of course *nix has overcome some of the hideous issues of the past even most recently as a couple of years ago. Beyond a couple of years ago the support for main stream drivers for different HW was an issue where you had to be a bit of a detective to find the working solution as it wasn't picked up automagically by the OS when inserting a new piece of HW. No OS is 100% though when it comes to this as even Windows applies drivers that are decades old and if you don't check device manager and apply OEM updates you'll be at risk or have stability issues with the HW / system.

Playing around with *nix as an everyday OS for ~20 years there are ways for making it work for you and the apps you want to use / depend on. First option is *nix as the primary OS boot/system and then apply something like VMWare or an alternative like Virtual Box which is free. I opt to use a VM of Windows over the years as it's easy to setup and run when needed for Windows ONLY apps. Also after you setup the VM and install every option you need / updates / service packs / etc. you can make a copy of the fresh VM and store it somewhere else in case you mess it up somehow and need to start fresh again.

Running a Dual Boot setup can cause issues if you do updates in either OS and it messes with the boot partition. Dealing with this can be a real PITA if you're not familiar with Grub by command line. Running *nix with a VM of windows is much easier to manage until you get knee deep into the idiosyncrasies of running both OS' side by side. Running *nix does get you closer to 100% performance from your HW though vs Windows that just chews up resources for no good reason in most cases.

Windows unfortunately is the money maker for apps. Apps appeal to the highest # of users that are willing to pay and able to use their software. Most businesses use Windows 10 because home users don't have experience with anything else in the past 30 years since GUI OS started appearing. Sure a GUI makes things easy for the non power user. The learning curve of point and click is null. Apple being based in the *nix ecosystem though offers a chance to play around a bit more with commands similar to a true *nix system. Though it's more jailed off than a true open source iteration it offers a 50/50 experience if you're willing to look under the hood and tinker around with it.

For stability though there's a reason *nix is the primary option for running the internet and things that require higher uptime in the 99.999% realm. While I can run a *nix system for ages of time between reboots it puts it at rick when it comes to updating the kernel and underlying packages. I tend to install Kernel updates weekly which requires a reboot that takes about 30 seconds of time. In an office / Data Center environment there's redundant systems running the same software so this isn't noticeable to the user when maintenance is performed. The load is balanced between the systems for the best experience and designed to run at less than 50% of capacity for the necessary reboots or failures to be handled by a single system while replacing the down system.

In the past when it comes to the types of FS that *nix could read/write from there were hack ways of making it work that have already been mentioned. However FAT / exFAT / NTFS still lead to more issues with data integrity than EXTx versions supported in *nix systems. Fighting with these different FS over the past couple of decades and reverse engineering different HW from NAS, FW, Routers, Switches, DVR's, and so on finding many of them using some underlying *nix OS with some overlay to make it "branded" lead to just doing away with 6-10 different devices and incorporating them into a single "server" for me. I took those devices and added a couple of PCI card and configured some packages to make them irrelevant, take up space, consume power, and failures.

I built with experience dealing with Networks on a global scale of different companies I've worked for over the years. I started out with non-moving storage for the base system i.e. SSD / NVME for the OS. No moving parts means less chance of a failure for 24/7 operation. Taking into account that most systems were using *nix in some form for their OS I went with Ubuntu as it was familiar from using it in the past and working with the debian based CLI was more intuitive than switching things up to something different. I went digging around for HW like Ethernet cards to provide WAN / LAN connections as slowly killing off devices one by one and bringing them into the system. Nice thing about *nix is you can control the individual ports when using them for either connecting to your WAN i.e. Cable Modem, Router, etc. allocating them as needed to either side of the network. Diversification / redundancy is easily applied as you could take a port from each card and if one card failed you had a connection still through the other. I added a PCI card w/ quad NTSC tuners for the DVR replacement and the shows just record in a *.ts format to the HDD. Post processing them to *.mp4 reduces their size though by 80%. I picked up a dual radio PCI card for making a WIFI "router" and configured that and killed off the router I had. I used the WIFI card for a few years before AX came knocking on the door and switched to an AP (powered over ethernet). The router/firewall/switch/WIFI portion took some leaps of faith to get completely cutover from multiple devices but, I feel much more secure knowing things are actually being filtered properly vs relying on a blind approach from an off the shelf router from wal-mart or best buy.

There's a use for either OS option discussed in this thread but, if you want take back some control over your data / privacy / security then *nix is the way to go. If you want simplicity then stick with what you pay for from Microsoft / Apple. If you're a business and paying for RHEL it's a waste of $ unless you don't have a clue what's going on with the OS and need the "support". You can take any flavor of *nix and make it work to your will through the commands you give it. Some HW is compatible with all *nix and others aren't and that's something to take into consideration when making a purchase. There are some *nix bases options out there for different appliances that charge a fee for support / customized experience but, if you look / ask around there's a free/correct way to do it vs a potential backdoor from an OEM.

ETA: using the server approach to funnel all network traffic though it as the "router" allows for whole network VPN protection from boot up as well w/o the limited options of off the shelf routers and overpriced / inadequate VPN options they offer as "partners".

 

Huh, so I wanted to steer away from Windows on my Zbook 15 G2. I ran Pop OS 21.04 which was based on this version, and discovered that it doesn't show anything about mobile broadband. It appears in lsusb, yet it doesn't show in Network unlike 20.04. Running Ubuntu 21.04 also exhibited the issue.

What didn't seem to be working was my LT4112 Gobi 4G, so I'm not entirely sure what's causing the issue but maybe kernel related. As much as I actually liked it more since I found it faster, I can't exactly use it if one or more pieces of hardware aren't working correctly.

 

Linux is great overall. When you are using hardware that other Linux devs and contributors are using it is generally fantastic. Chances are things will work well because those people need them on their systems. What can make Linux less than great and unpalatable is when you are using hardware that none of them are and the manufacturer doesn't support Linux with drivers. Even when they do, sometimes manufacturers provide little or not documentation and they are not going to burn a lot of calories on providing good quality Linux drivers unless they are actively involved with Linux.

Same is true of my overclocking interests. Due to a lack of interest with Linux devs and contributors, and probably a lack of capable hardware, there is almost nothing available that is worth installing. The only truly decent software is Green with Envy (GWE) for NVIDIA GPU overclocking. Some of the handful of other software titles don't work well, or not at all, and haven't been updated or supported for years. Most people are not overclocking enthusiasts, so this doesn't affect them and they don't care. The benchmark software titles that work on Linux are also sucky and the number of them is limited for the same reason.

If you're an ordinary geek that does ordinary things, and do not run uncommon hardware and peripheral devices, Linux is amazing and highlights what a lousy product Windows has become. I would use Linux only, for everything, if I could. But, I don't want to abandon most of the things I do that form the very basis of why I love computers. So, I have to use both Windows and Linux.

 

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=214264

Looks like someone got it working. might requires some tweaks to the image version but, it should work.

I had an interesting encounter this week with my 5GE 4-port NIC I'm using where 5.14 kernel just released but caused a system halt even though the 5.14RC7 version works just fine. Sometimes the kernel releases miss something when they compile a new version and you just have to wait it out or try a different version. I've run in to this before with different things and sometimes the mainline kernel isn't going to work as the HW was designed after it was compiled and newer versions work. Manual kernel updates are easy to do to get functionality rather than relying on the "update" feature to pull it (which won't happen w/o considerable delay).

https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/?C=N;O=D

 

did you install anything related to python? i had a similar issue, some dependancy messed up the installer. just run "sudo apt install --reinstall update-manager".

 

I guess some follow up here might be relevant.

I opened a ticket to resolve the kernel issue and a couple of the devs looked into it but didn't come up with a solution. However I rebuilt the system from the ground up with ADL 12700K and that enabled the use of 5.15.x and worked fine. So, it leads me to think that kernel releases may deprecate based on HW new releases. The FW for the card seems to be fine as the kernel progressed but for whatever reason the combination of the other HW didn't play well together. I've been able to do weekly upgrades since the rebuild without having any issues with ADL. Why coffee lake stopped working in conjunction with the card at that specific release? Can't say exactly why.