Ubuntu 9.04 update to something newer
Kent Borg
kentborg at borg.org
Thu Sep 5 13:23:39 UTC 2013
On 09/05/2013 08:55 AM, sandman42 at libero.it wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> in a VM I have an ubuntu 9.04 (not accessible from internet), and I've been
> trying to update it in order to install newer releases of the programs I use on
> it.
Updates are tricky. The idea is that who knows what unknown stuff you
have done to some old version can be automatically applied to a newer
version. Like magic. This is hard to engineer, and very hard and
cumbersome to test.
I think of a successful update as being a bonus. The cases where an
update works (the easy ones) are where it isn't very useful. The cases
where you really want it to work (the hard ones) are where it likely won't.
I mostly never try.
> What could I do, except reinstalling everything from scratch???
Yes.
I do suggest a couple things:
- The first is a little tricky technical matter: Do a custom
partitioning and put /home in its own partition, then when you want to
install a new version, install without touching your /home partition,
and later add a line to /etc/fstab to mount it. (Note, some programs,
such as Thunderbird, don't do well using a config data from an old
version--this is an example of why updates are hard.)
- The second is a little discipline: On every new installation, create
a file in your home directory (I call it adminlog.txt). Every time you
make some administrative change add a dated note saying what you did.
(Mostly this will be the programs you install.) Now, after you want to
install a new version of Ubuntu, you can refer to your notes to help you
get things the way you want them again.
-kb
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