Maverick on USB created on Jaunty

[J]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 21:05, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-12-31 at 20:41 -0500, J wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 20:32, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
>> The proper way to upgrade is via apt (or technically Update Manager,
>> though I prefer apt-get from command line).
>
> That may be so. After attempting it twice with earlier versions of
> Ubuntu and having the upgrades fail completely[1], I no longer bother.
> Is the process now reliable?

It is for me :-)  I know what you mean about the older versions
though.  There was a time when I never suggested upgrades to anyone,
mostly because I'm an old school Red Hat guy (Since the RH 5.1 days)
and upgrading Red Hat was always a PITA...  For Ubuntu, it used to be
a nightmare, but now, not so much, IMHO...  The system I'm using right
now has been directly upgraded since Karmic (Karmic - Lucid -
Maverick) and I'll upgrade it to Natty soon, probably around beta
time.

Same deal for my netbook (though now it's been flattened and
re-installed from scratch with both Maverick and Natty on separate
partitions.

> Another reason for me not doing this (and I may be completely mistaken
> here) is that I thought/think that it has to happen over the network.
> Being as I am at the far end of a wet piece of string network-wise, I
> want/need to upgrade from local storage. I spend the requisite hours
> getting the release via BitTorrent unattended. Can apt-get do an
> "apt-get dist-upgrade" from a CD?

Yeah, you'd be correct there, unfortunately.  The only way I could see
doing it locally, and this could be completely off, would be to build
a repo on your local network, load packages from the CD ISO onto that,
and then add that local system as a repo somehow and update from
there... I have NO idea, though, how that would work in practice.
Maybe I'll look into that as a project for the first part of this
year...

My biggest complaint with Ubuntu upgrades is that I can't see any way
to do exactly what you said, upgrade from CD without actually
re-installing.  With RH, that much was easy at least... it offered to
upgrade if it detected an older version of itself on the hard disk,
and in the later version, that seemed to work really well.  I guess
you could script something that builds a list of installed packages on
your machine, then installs any matching packages from the CD
directly....

I've got "something" like that, very basic, that just basically does a
diff of two package files and installs the missing packages via
apt-get online... it's something I cobbled together as a very
rudimentary provisioning system, so I could build up a development box
and then install a second machine and get it's installed package list
to match the original system without me having to hunt for
everything... So the similar would be, package list of your current
system, then look for those packages on the ISO and dpkg -i $package
if it exists in the list and also on the CD.  Of course, that would do
nothing for anything you installed from other repos like Universe or
Restricted.

>> You're talking about a re-install, basically, not an upgrade.
>
> Yes. An "up-install", perhaps :-)
>
>> However, I agree with your complaint. BUT IMHO, usb-creator is not the
>> best tool out there, there are better means of creating a bootable USB
>> stick that DO work across older and current versions.
>
> What tools are better?

My personal favorite is UNetbootin which I use a lot for building
bootable USB sticks from just about any ISO... ubuntu, fedora, suse,
slackware, puppy, etc.. it's worked for every one and never seems to
have an issue with previous or new versions of any distro I happen to
be playing with.

There are probably others out there as well that work too.  Like I
said, the big issue I've had with usb-creator is that it only seems to
work for the version of Ubuntu it came with (e.g. the Maverick version
only seems to work well when making Maverick ISOs, etc...)

Oh well, Happy New Year, I need to get to bed...

Cheers!

Jeff