Upgrade advice

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 26 May 2008, Dean Mumby wrote:

> I am currently running ubuntu ltsp 7.04 I was wondering what the best
> approach might be to get to ubuntu 8.04
> 1. Should I upgrade to 7.10 using the upgrade manager and then upgrade
> to 8.04 using the same or
> 2. Should I somehow upgrade to 8.04 using the alternate cd etc or
> 3.???

My understanding is that [1] is the option you must use.  I guess for what
it's worth an option [3] would be to install from scratch, but obviously
most people won't want to do that.

> Any suggestions , this is a production machine in use everyday , I want
> to try avoid any downtime.

I think you'll need to schedule some downtime (or at least "unreliable"
time) as the upgrade will require reboots and some system services and
applications (eg firefox) may stop working or not work well during the
upgrade working.  Have you any school holidays coming up?

Each upgrade should probably take the download time (dependent on your
number of installed packages and speed of net connection) and the install
time itself.  For me that's usually 2-3 hours.  

It's possible that you can "pre-download" most of the packages.  One
possible way would be to temporarily change edgy to gutsy in
/etc/apt/sources.list, then do: 
	sudo apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade
then undo the changes to /etc/apt/sources.list and perform the upgrade
using the supported route.

If you have sufficient disk space on /var you could also pre-download the
hardy packages in the same way.  This might help reduce your upgrade
window.  Be sure to restore /etc/apt/sources.list before the real upgrade
though.

Gavin