Before Upgrading to Edgy
It seems that some people with heavily customised Ubuntu installations have had problems upgrading from dapper to edgy. While we do test upgrades as much as we can, there’s no way to test every possible permutation, so problems do creep in.
Here’s a checklist to perform before upgrading to minimise any problems you might have:
- Make sure you have the
ubuntu-minimalandubuntu-desktoppackages installed (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. should use the appropriate meta-packages for their distribution). This may require removing some replacement programs you have installed, but you can always put those back after the upgrade process. - Check for any locally installed packages, you can use
aptitude search '~i!~Oubuntu'to get a list of them. Some of these may cause conflicts with the upgrade process, it may be worth removing them and putting them back after the upgrade. - If you have manually installed any software from upstream, and not used Ubuntu packages (especially the Nvidia or ATI binary drivers), revert those to the Ubuntu-provided versions before upgrading.
- Use the update manager, as described in the release notes, and not
apt-get dist-upgrade. While the latter may work eventually, it will require more manual tinkering than the automatic upgrader.
If, after taking all of these precautions, your upgrade still fails; please file a bug report, and try to include as much information as possible. Provide the list of packages that failed, and if possible the error message provided by them. Provide /var/log/dpkg.log and the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade.
Thanks for these hints! But shouldn’t all this be part of the official upgrade instructions (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyReleaseNotes#head-b07f8bdf28ae0444c03e1a61110c683c77e56cd0)?
I think a major problem is that Kubuntu doesn’t provide the update manager, and the 6.10 release notes for kubuntu [1] suggest using apt-get dist-upgrade when moving to Edgy.
[1]http://kubuntu.org/announcements/6.10-release.php
A list of locally installed packages (not from ubuntu) can be easily obtained using synaptic:
1) Go to Configuration->Repositories and turn off all non-oficial repositories
2) Click the bottom Update and wait for synaptic to download the updated packages lists.
3) Click the bottom Status and select “Installed (locally or obsolete)”
There you have, the list of locally installed pagkages. Since you are in synpatic you can even start removing the packages now
After Edgy break up my two systems, I doubt why I was upgrading in the first place. Please keep away from “edgy”s, I would rather have something stable.
If it works, don’t fix it.
My Dapper install works fine, all the software is updated, so why bother?
Even the gravity need some fixes today =)