Upgrading

[Myriam Rita Schweingruber]

Hi Neil,

Am Freitag, 19. Januar 2007 10:20 schrieb Neil Winchurst:
...
> However, one thing that I have learnt over the years is that upgrades
> just don't work. Up to now I have always wiped the hard drive and
> installed as new each time I have gone for a newer or different distro.

While this is certainly recommended if you change distro, I don't think this 
is necessary if you don't skip releases. I'm using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since the 
very early days and never experienced big difficulties upgrading.

> So Feisty is due out in April. So what do I do then? If I stay with
> Edgy, which is working just fine for me, will I have any problems? Am I
> right in thinking that, after April, Edgy will no longer be supported?
 
There is no reason you will have problems with Edgy beyond 07.04, usually the 
support for non-LTS releases is 18 months anyway.

> Has anyone out there had a successful upgrade in Kubuntu? After a couple
> of disastrous attempts at upgrades in the past I am very wary.

To be sure your future upgrades work without problems, just keep in mind a few 
rules:

- don't skip releases, as there is no upgrade possible, so upgrading from 
Dapper do Feisty for example would not work, one has to either do a clean 
install or upgrade Dapper -> Edgy -> Feisty.
- don't upgrade to Alpha or Beta releases, be patient to wait for final 
releases.
- make sure you have the kubuntu-desktop package installed. Even if it's not 
mandatory I found out that dist-upgrades work far better with this 
metapackage installed (at least for Dapper -> Edgy).
- do the following _before_ your dist-upgrade:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get autoclean
this cleans unnecessary files
- after 07.04 edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and change _every_ occurrence 
of "edgy" into "feisty" (keep in mind that dist-upgrades are supported to 
work only for official (e.g. "main") branches, so if you 
use  "universe", "multiverse" and/or "restricted", some packages might not be 
upgraded in early stage release).
- proceed to upgrade your distribution:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Dual boot installation users should backup their /boot/grub/menu.lst before, 
as there will be a new kernel installed which can cause problems for booting 
other OS.

Hope I did not forget something "vital" but this proceeding works fine for me 
since Warty :-)

Greets, Myriam

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