Upgrade

One of the great features of Debian based systems is the ability to upgrade, from one version to the next, directly from the internet. This is a bit tricky from Kubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) to Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy), because some essential packages are changing names among other things. The purpose of this page is to document how I do the upgrades, to make it as painless as possible.

• The official way to do this is documented at EdgyUpgrades

The process

I recommend doing this from a console session.

At the login screen press Alt-N to switch to a console session.

Login with your username and password.

1. Become root.

sudo -i

2. First ensure that both "main restricted" lines are uncommented before doing this, i.e., in /etc/apt/sources.list, the following two lines

 deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-updates main restricted
 deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper-updates main restricted

do not have a comment character (#) in front.

Then backup and change /etc/apt/sources.list from dapper to edgy. The backup will be: /etc/apt/sources.list.bak

# cp /etc/apt/sources.{list,list.bak}; sed -i s/dapper/edgy/g /etc/apt/sources.list

3. Update package indexes.

# apt-get update

4. Do the dist-upgrade

# apt-get -u dist-upgrade

5. Install some magic packages.

# apt-get install kubuntu-desktop python-qt3 python-kde3 ubuntu-minimal

6. Install all the held-back packages. (This can be evil if you have put packages on hold manually, as they will be upgraded.)

# apt-get -s -u dist-upgrade | grep ^' ' | xargs apt-get -y install

NOTE: during this step, one user reports that his terminal screen showed what looked almost like a printer or screen test page, and then went blank. After about a half hour, he turned off the computer, rebooted, and redid the above two lines. Things worked fine thence.

7. Reboot to complete the upgrade.

# reboot

Done.

Comments

Did it work for you? Did you experience problems? Please give me feedback!

For me it worked, although I had a couple of small problems because my hard drive get full during the install. (Hopefully you were online. ) To help the others to avoid this problem (or solve it alone) here comes the solution. (As I have learned from fdoving, all the packages get downloaded before install, so you really need free space for an upgrade.)

First of all, if you run to a problem, you will get some description of it in the last lines of the program output. (ex: no space left on device). Then you can find out the source of the problem. In my case I had to run

# apt-get clean

Then I tried to do the last step again, but get an error. The solution is the same: read the last few lines, probably you will even get a hint. Follow the hint, and if you get a new error then follow the next hint, etc. As long as you get some hints.

Once you don't get more hints, start again the process from step 4. -- V7