Successful upgrade from Sid to Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog

[heimo]

This is lengthy description of my successful, but a bit complicated
upgrade from Debian unstable (Sid) to Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog.

Thanks to this message, I decided to try upgrading Debian Sid to Hoary
Hedgehog. I've been using Linux for about 8 years - different
distributions, mostly Red Hat and Debian. I've heard good things about
Ubuntu and as I found out that it's based on Debian, step to try it on
my own wasn't too big.

Couple days ago I installed Hoary Hedgehog from scratch to my second
computer, which is now my primary mail server. I was going to use
Debian stable for that, but at the moment I don't see problem using
Ubuntu - I did switch from Sendmail/Dovecot/Squirrelmail to
Postfix/Dovecot/Squirrelmail and I still have Spamassassin to
configure. I got very good first impression with this fresh install and
decided to upgrade my main computer to Ubuntu, too.

It didn't go smoothly, but it's definitely possible to upgrade Debian
sid to Ubuntu's latest. I'll describe here my experiences so that other
people may make their own decisions and possibly even get around some
problems that may arise.

This computer (which I'm using at the moment and that was upgraded) was
first installed as Debian stable (Woody) almost a year ago. Later I
decided I wanted a bit more recent software on it and used Debian's
great apt-get package manager to "dist-upgrade", upgrade from stable to
unstable (Sid), which is Debians development tree - quite stable
actually - the name 'unstable' is misleading - it just describes that
it is constantly changing, not that the software on it would be
technically unstable.

I've lots of packages installed on this computer. Briefly the main
components of this computer: Epox mainboard, AMD Athlon 2600+, 512MB
memory, two SATA hard disks (240GB total), Nvidia 5200FX graphics card.
Nothing fancy, not the greatest and latest, but not too old either.

I don't have all the details of upgrade, but I'll list the main points.
I started by putting Ubuntu sources to /etc/apt/sources.list and removed
Debian sources. I also uncommented universe. Then I just bravely entered
'apt-get update' and 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. It suggested to download
601MB of packages, upgrade 810, install 71 new ones, remove 10 and
leave 1 package as is. It took some time..

There was problems, so I did 'apt-get install -f', which installed
missing libgda (or something like that). Then there was error about
xfree86-common, which I removed ('apt-get remove xfree86-common'),
tried to install ubuntu-desktop and tried the dist-upgrade again,
couple times. I tried to install ubuntu-desktop package, but it
failed.

There were errors about x-window-system package, so I removed it and
xprt and xprt-common. I didn't know exactly what to remove, but found
out that libnewt was blocking the successfull ubuntu-desktop package
install, so I removed it - which suggested to remove hudreds of other
packages which debended each on other. I accepted the risk, removed
over one gigabytes of packages, after which I removed also php5-gd
package, did 'apt-get -f install' and couple times 'apt-get
dist-upgrade'.

There was still some problems with my old Gnome stuff and other
programs, so I removed gnome* and nautilus*, found out that
libbonoboui2 and libbonoboui2-common packages had debendency problems,
tried removing the blocking packages and then installing them again.
Some of these included gaim-data and gimp-data, which I just removed
and reinstalled 'apt-get remove gaim-data' 'apt-get install gaim-data'.
Did some more dist-upgrades to find out which packages had conflicts,
resolved those issues the same way (there were 4-5 similar problems)
and then I was able to install ubuntu-desktop package successfully.

All this time I was using my old Debian sid (the same box I was
upgrading), at some point my Firefox refused to cooperate (died), and
when the ubuntu-desktop and the xorg (instead of xfree) was
successfully installed, I killed the X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace,
entered startx on console and... desktop loaded successfully. 

Well - there were error messages of some icons that were missing (or
not found), which I just removed from the panel. Resolution was wrong
and refresh rate too low, so I installed xresprobe package, run it
('xresprobe nvidia'), tweaked /etc/X11/xorg.conf accordingly. Output
from xresprobe:

id: CM752
res: 1600x1200 1280x1024 1024x768 832x624 800x600 720x400 640x480
freq: 31-101 50-160
disptype: crt

Section in xorg.conf I edited:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier  "Generic Monitor"
Option      "DPMS"
HorizSync   31-101
VertRefresh 50-160
EndSection


And also added new resolution to Screen section. Restarted xorg and
everything was up and runnig. Checked that I had no packages to upgrade
and started to reinstall couple programs that were still missing (these
were probably from universe), checked the servers (had to start
apache2), Sendmail was up, websites were up (this is very versatile box
for developing+testing+hosting my work), my desktop was up and running
much more smoothly than before.

That's one man's story of upgrading Debian Sid to Ubuntu Hoary
Hedgehog, with some problems which were possible to get around. It took
around 3 hours, I had to download total of around 900 megabytes, I
haven't booted the computer yet, so I'm still running my own kernel,
the same one I used to use on my Debian Sid box yesterday... Not much
downtime to any services - had to restart X two times, that's it.

And I'm now happy Ubuntu user.

Thanks Magnus (the message abowe that encouraged me to try this stunt).
Thanks other Ubuntu developers and users. Hopefully this experience can
help someone else in the similar position.


-- 
heimo