Problem upgrading from 6.06.2 LTS to 8.04.1 LTS

[Rich Carreiro]

> > When I run:
> >    sudo do-release-upgrade -d
> 
> This tries to upgrade to the latest devel release (i.e. 8.10) which is
> not what you want. 

Well, it would be nice if the offical docs didn't say
to put the "-d" in to do the upgrade to 8.04.1, then.  :)

> > But when I do that, I get the "Unable to calculate upgrade
> > message".  I don't believe I have anything weird installed
> > (how can I tell?).  What is the process for debugging this
> > to see what is preventing do-release-upgrade from
> > performing the upgrade?
> 
> Check that /etc/apt/sources.list has still the 6.06 repositories (and
> nothing else), run "apt-get update" and try again.

sources.list is fine.  The problem is that I need to do
"do-release-upgrade -m desktop" (in my case), not just
"do-release-upgrade".  (The machine in question is a remote,
headless machine that originally started at 5.04 years ago,
back before there was a server distribution and so is still
currently a "desktop" machine even though it's full of
server packages.)

However, I'm not going to upgrade yet, since there's a kernel
bug in the Gutsy 2.6.22-15 kernel and (applicable to me) also
in the Dapper 2.6.15-52 kernel that will case localedef to go
into an unkillable hang during the upgrade, leaving you in
a very bad state.  (All the press (such as it is) is about about
the Gutsy kernel bug, but launchpad shows the same fix has been 
committed to the Dapper kernel.

I'm waiting until the fix is incorporated and updates issued
and then atempt the upgrade.

--
Rich Carreiro                            rlcarr at rlcarr.com