Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Woes with upgrade?

My dad has been running 7.04 since it came out (he had a nasty bout with a virus that deleted all his data). This weekend, I was planning on upgrading his computer to 8.04 and let him sit on that till the next LTS release.

I have never done and upgrade that large before. I know I should do it incrementally (7.04 -> 7.10 ->8.04). Has anyone had a problem doing this? All his apps are from the repos, so there aren't any weird apps on there. Should I


cat /etc/apt/sources.list | sed -e s/feisty/gutsy/g | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

...

cat /etc/apt/sources.list | sed -e s/gutsy/hardy/g | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

??? Or would you suggest just letting Update Manager handle it?

I would like to try as hard as I can to not have to format.
Any tips (outside of backing up data, that is a no-brainer) that could help are greatly appreciated!
Posted by Brandon Perry at 10:18 AM

6 comments:

  1. JoneWednesday, June 18, 2008 11:30:00 AM

    I've done some upgrades from 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 without any problems. Do it incrementally, and let update-manager handle it. Should be NP.

    ReplyDelete
  2. slashdotaccountWednesday, June 18, 2008 12:53:00 PM

    Wow, convoluted use of shell much??

    sed -i s/gutsy/hardy/ /etc/apt/sources.list

    ReplyDelete
  3. SamatWednesday, June 18, 2008 2:51:00 PM

    I agree with jone: do it incrementally, and use update-manager. It shouldn't take too much longer and is the supported (and "safe") way to upgrade between Ubuntu releases.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownWednesday, June 18, 2008 6:16:00 PM

    An alternative to update-manager is "do-release-upgrade".

    ReplyDelete
  5. CarterFriday, June 20, 2008 6:52:00 AM

    It's more superstition than logic, but I always run

    sudo apt-get upgrade

    Twice before I try

    sudo apt-get dis-upgrade

    And I've never had any problems. Also, I've never tried doing a full upgrade outside the command-line environment, but for what it's worth I do have secondhand knowledge of someone who managed to get their box into a VERY bad state using the upgrade GUI.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Topher HuntThursday, June 26, 2008 6:59:00 PM

    I'm not a long-time Linux user but this is just my two cents... is your father's machine set up with /home on a separate partition? I moved my /home to a new partition in March and it was amazing how much more confident I am with dist-upgrades knowing that my data (and settings) are walled off from the package changes. I haven't had great experiences with gui-based upgrades; each release I've usually just ended up reinstalling over the install partition - which is SO much easier to do when /home is elsewhere.

    ReplyDelete

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