From Gutsy To Intrepid: An Ubuntu Upgrade Report my experience upgrading from 7.10 to 8.10

[mm22 0]

I thought I would share this should it be of use to anyone.

I used Linux Ubuntu 7.10 for some time, not having an internet connection I was never able to run apt-get or any other update manager in order to get upgrades. So my version of the software was pretty much the official first release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon in October 2007. I only used that system occasionally, mainly to get familiar with Ubuntu and changed a few settings overtime.

When I had a chance to get an internet connection on that computer I decided to start updating my Ubuntu system and start running "apt-get update" in order to update the list of packages. It never went smoothly, instead I always encountered problems when retrieving the list of packages, either through terminal or graphical package manager (Synaptic Package Manager or similar). As a result I messed around quite a bit with /etc/apt/sources.list file in order to get a few packages downloaded. Among others I managed to install Skype after installing the required libraries (for example libQt4).

Since Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10) was no longer supported (Ubuntu releases are usually supported for up to 18months) I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron through the Update Manager (in topbar menu System>Administration). The installer had to download some 500MB of new packages and took a few hours to do that. Everything seemed fine during the installation process until right at the end a few packages failed to install. The installation completed but the damage caused by the missing packages was apparently too serious and I was left with a "your system might be unusable" message. In fact it was still usable, although a few things looked funny here and there. After rebooting though the boot loader could not load Ubuntu at all, supposedly because the kernel had changed and grub had not been amended accordingly.

Possibly other things would have gone wrong even if I had fixed the boot loader instructions, so I just decided to go for a CD installation (I have a Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installation disk). I wanted to check if this could clear up the mess and install a working system which is two releases away from the original 7.10. The first time I started the system live from Ubuntu CD. It is nice to have a working system readily available with no need to install anything. It even configured my Wi-Fi card correctly, something that always takes some time on Windows.

I launched a 8.10 install and made sure I use the same partition where 7.10 (and now a broken version of 8.04) was installed. I did not format that partition and chose to keep my documents and data from that installation as the installer asked. All went smoothly until it was time to install Grub boot loader, i.e. what takes care of your system booting into one OS or the other. Since a fatal error occurred (the boot loader could not be written or similar error message) the installer exited and I was left again with a non-bootable system. I did not investigate whether I could manually change grub settings (grub was already installed before and configured for dual boot Ubuntu plus XP). Instead I reinstalled the whole thing again, this time disabling the "install boot loader" option. I wanted to see if the problem was only related to grub installation.

The installation of 8.10 went smoothly this time but the system was still not bootable because the boot loader tried to access the wrong kernel (the one for 7.10 instead of the updated one). So what I did was boot once again in Live mode and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst which contains the instructions for the boot loader. Note that you need to edit the file with root privileges in order to be able to save it, for example:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

I changed the line calling the kernel for 7.10

kernel		  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-24-generic [...]

to

kernel		  /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic [...]

which is the most recent kernel found in /boot

This time the system boots and Ubuntu 8.10 is finally up and running. I am now running apt-get again to upgrade the packages and I will then try to fix a few things which are misbehaving right now, including firefox (menu bar not working properly).

The best part of all this is that my documents and settings are still there, even Apache server, php and MySQL (lampp server installed in /opt) are still working.

Over all it would certainly have been faster to just go for the CD installation, especially on a slow connection. Automated distribution upgrade through Update Manager is probably a good option if the system is already up to date and all the important packages are properly configured. I plan to do that when upgrading to version 9.xx (Ubuntu versions are numbered after the year.month of release).

[alexthemans 0]

Sweat. Many well-known packages like apache, mysql are really mature right now, the details of their configuration are somehow fixed. Therefore configuration files are appliable to (OS) upgraded system without significant changes.