Sunday, August 28, 2011

Upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy

The upgrade to Gutsy is, unfortunately, the worst yet. For the upgrade to Hardy, Update Manager offers a partial upgrade (as usual) but I'll keep that as a last resort like last time.

Synaptic fails to detect the Hardy CD despite the fact it _is_ present
Synaptic seems to not be able to see the Hardy Heron CD that I've mounted. Quite ironic since the CD was successfully added using Synaptic. I won't even bother trying apt-get this time. Instead I'll try out the cdromupgrade script that now comes standard with the install CD.

Update Manager can't resolve something; just wish it'd give me a little more info
Unfortunately, it can't seem to figure out how to do the upgrade. I'm starting to wonder what's the point of the cdromupgrade script. It seems to have only worked the one time during the Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 upgrade.

Hardy Heron is the 2nd Ubuntu LTS release and is currently still supported on the server. That means the packages are still available for download despite the desktop no longer getting support.

Online upgrade with Update Manager
Ideally, I'd like to see successful offline upgrades using only the Ubuntu CDs. Unfortunately, it seems that's just not practical. With each successive upgrade, errors creep into the upgraded install. It's amazing that many Linux users used to joke about how Windows users need to reformat every 6 months. Ubuntu doesn't look like it's much better in that regard.

Updating online with Update Manager worked but not without it's own little niggles. It defaults to the -386 kernel instead of -generic for one. For some reason the -386 kernel just stops during boot. Manually selecting the latest installed -generic kernel works fine though.

System Monitor looking weird. Seems to be just a display glitch though
There's also System Monitor which seems to have developed some display issues. Other than the display glitch, it appears to work fine.

Just to be on the safe side, I attempt to shake off some outdated packages from terminal.

~$ sudo apt-get purge ubuntu-desktop
~$ sudo apt-get autoremove
~$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

That seems to shake off a few packages, but doesn't fix System Monitor. It's still got the display bug. To be extra safe, I used Synaptic to remove all kernels except the current -generic build, and upgraded lvm2 which somehow wasn't upgraded. From the looks of things, Update Manager's cleanup step doesn't clean up nearly as thoroughly as I thought. There's a lot of obsolete packages left untouched.

Next up: Upgrading to Intrepid Ibex

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