Written by jblackhall the 29 Apr 08 at 03:48.
Category: System.
Related project:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
Rationale
Overall, I was pretty happy with the Gusty to Hardy upgrade process. It was fairly straight-forward. One thing I thought was very confusing was a question prompting what it should do with menu.lst. It then gives options like "Keep the currently installed version" or "Install the package maintainer's version". First, many users will have no idea what menu.lst is or does. Second, even if they do know what it does, the options are not explained correctly (as I understand them) during the upgrade. Since many users have a Windows partition listed in their menu.lst, they want that to be preserved, so they might think they should "keep the current version". However, this means that the new kernel version will not be loaded (see Launchpad link). This question should better explain what will actually happen for each of the options. Many users who chose this incorrectly are currently using the Gutsy kernel, which breaks nVidia graphics drivers on upgrade (see forum post, there are lots). That's no good.
I think this only happens if you have manually changed your menu.lst, which means hopefully you know what it is and how to read it (which you should have learned before changing it yourself)
I didn't realize that. Regardless, by selecting "keep the current version", you're telling Ubuntu that you want to keep referencing the old kernel (dunno if that's a bug or not). Once I uninstalled the old kernel, I was prompted with the same question again and I chose to install the package maintainer's version. This simply updated my menu.lst with the new kernel. It kept all my customizations to the Automagic kernel list and it kept my Windows partition perfectly. If that's the case, then why would you offer to "keep the old version" as the default behavior? People (like me) might be scared to change something if they're not exactly sure how it will be changed. Especially if they think "well my current system works, so I'll leave that file how it is".