[Ubuntu-US-CA] Least painful way to upgrade 12.10?

[Alex Mandel]

On 06/17/2014 11:29 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> All,
> 
> So I have a Zenbook Prime running 12.10, which is EOL.  I understand I'm
> going to have to step it through upgrades to 13.04 and 13.10 to get it
> to 14.04.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> a) is there a "least painful" way to do this?
> 
> b) is there a good way to back up my entire HDD image so that I can
> revert to 12.10 if things go south?
> 

If you have a big enough external drive use Clonezilla live distro to
create a clone image.

Then do a fresh install of 14.04

Want to get nifty:
1. export your package selections with dpkg get-selections to make
reinstalling same stuff easier on the new system
2. move your home directory to a separate partition then you only have
to write over the / with the fresh install, home directory can stay in
place. (this could be done with a large external too, bit of a shuffle game)

Let me know if you need more details (can't find on the internet).

Thanks,
Alex