Dist Upgrade Complete
November 19th, 2007 | Published in Kubuntu | 21 Comments
I am now running Hardy on my production laptop. This is typical, however I started a bit late with my unstable abuse that I enjoy for one reason or the other. I installed Dapper Flight 3 on this Laptop and have dist-upgraded ever since. So that was like March of ’06? Not to shabby. I have yet to do a fresh install on this laptop, and it runs as great as it did just over a year and a half ago. Impressive Kubuntu!
So just a quick howto on how I did my latest dist-upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy:
$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list # in vim do :%s/gutsy/hardy then press enter $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade $ sudo shutdown -r now
Doesn’t get any easier! Granted many people will tell you “NOOOOOOO!” when it comes to this way, but it has yet to fail me in over a year and a half. So, while I have Hardy running, it is time to attack some bugs and get to hacking!
Yes, I used VIM in this write-up, so don’t spam the comments with nano, pico, emacs, and gEdit spam! Reason for using VIM, everyone, well everyone who just installed Gutsy from a CD, has VIM installed 
November 19th, 2007 at 22:16:44 (#)
Hmm. I currently run a mix of Gutsy and Hardy, using
/etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main restricted
(etc.)
/etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release hardy
Pin-Priority: 100
I’ve done this ever since Breezy. It lets me run a mostly-stable system, and when I want to pull something in from Hardy, I use “apt-get -t hardy”. Every so often I’ll look at the output of “apt-get -t hardy dist-upgrade -s”, upgrade the “boring and safe” bits, and pick some of the “interesting” bits to try out.
November 19th, 2007 at 22:25:24 (#)
Hey, I’ve also been running Hardy/Kubuntu for a bit now, and have been dist-upgrading since at least Edgy (not sure about since Dapper since I had a Dell/HD crash). However, when I try upgrading the xorg/xserver packages, there are a ton of packages that are to be removed. So, I’ve been selectively upgrading packages for now. Did your xorg packages get upgraded okay?
November 19th, 2007 at 23:14:54 (#)
all of my x packages worked fine today….there were some files I haven’t heard of, maybe 15, that got removed, but everything is up and running just fine now. I will monitor it over the next few days though just to make sure.
November 19th, 2007 at 23:15:35 (#)
@tom: I just noticed something, in Hardy, it shows us on Kubuntu Linux again! With Gutsy it was just GNU/Linux, so that is one annoying fix I struggled to find
November 19th, 2007 at 23:34:56 (#)
@ephemient: That is pretty slick. No major problems doing that over time? I used to do that with Debian and never had a problem, so I am guessing the same with *buntu.
November 19th, 2007 at 23:50:59 (#)
Has the avalanche of merging slowed to the point that its somewhat stable now? I had it running a few weeks back (probably a tad too early) and everything broke fantastically. I’m all about experiencing a little pain so the next guy doesn’t, but I still need a workable box.
if its workable now I’ll dive in
November 20th, 2007 at 00:03:38 (#)
so far it seems painless. I am sure there will be that one, two, three, or 100 times that I have issues during the cycle. I have always ran unstable/development releases. Stable is boring
November 20th, 2007 at 00:17:27 (#)
Make sure you have the right metapackages ( (x|k|)ubuntu-desktop, ubuntu-minimal, ubuntu-standard, and whatever kernel metapackage) installed before doing this.
November 20th, 2007 at 05:36:36 (#)
So for the newcomers to Ubuntu, would you care to explain why ‘many people will tell you “NOOOOOOO!” when it comes to this way’?
November 20th, 2007 at 07:47:29 (#)
While Ubuntu has VIM preinstalled, it preinstalls the vim-tiny variant which lacks many nice extra features of VIM. sudo apt-get install vim-gnome is probably the first command I run on a new Ubuntu installation.
November 20th, 2007 at 08:58:51 (#)
[...] Fonte deste post, aqui. [...]
November 20th, 2007 at 10:57:13 (#)
@Wolfger: well for one, if you don’t have the meta packages installed as Some Guy said, it can get ugly. Plus it is all command line, and there are a lot of people still afraid of it.
November 20th, 2007 at 17:07:57 (#)
Ah, looking into it a bit further, all those X apps being removed are now packaged in X11-apps, X11-utils, which get installed during the upgrade. Going for the xorg/xserver upgrade now.
November 20th, 2007 at 22:09:36 (#)
It borked my (backup) system. No GUI login, trying startx from CLI login results in a message like “no screens found”. Good thing I’m crazy enough to be dual-booting Gutsy and Gutsy, so no harm done.
November 21st, 2007 at 04:42:03 (#)
There’s other “special processing” that the normal upgrade procedure handles, like the conversion of /etc/fstab from device names to UUIDs a couple releases ago, and that doesn’t happen when dist-upgrading from release to release. I think that’s the major reason behind the “NOOOOO!”
apt-get install vim-full
is one of the first things I do on a new system, yup. (Who needs vim-gnome?)
November 21st, 2007 at 05:12:15 (#)
ephemient, I’ve always used only the dist-upgrade method in the past (instead of update-manager) and my device names have been converted to UUIDs successfully (in Edgy IIRC).
November 21st, 2007 at 06:21:49 (#)
but what about:
sed -i “s/gusty/hardy/g” /etc/sources.list
instead of an interactive editor?
November 21st, 2007 at 06:25:02 (#)
Ephemient: (Who needs vim-gnome?)
Those who don’t like waiting 2 seconds each time some column-editing is performed in a vi-terminal.
November 21st, 2007 at 12:32:08 (#)
I guess “who needs vim-gnome?” was kinda imflammatory. My point was that vim-full includes vim-gui already, and (to me) vim-gnome doesn’t add anything useful.
Hmm, so the UUID transition was a bad example, since upgrading volumeid ensures that fstab is converted in its postinst. I can’t think of a real situation where dist-upgrading might miss something important.
You can look at http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz — the official upgrade tool downloads and runs it — to see what an officially supported upgrade does, beyond “dist-upgrade”. Among other things, if /var/lib/apt/extended_states doesn’t exist (i.e. upgrading from before apt’s Auto-Installed handling), it initializes it in a (hopefully) nice way. That’s just a convenience, though.
Hypothetically, if Gutsy’s ubuntu-desktop depended on “esound” and Hardy’s depended on “pulseaudio | esound” (and shipped with pulseaudio), a dist-upgrade would still use esound and not pick up pulseaudio. That’s not such a big deal.
November 22nd, 2007 at 19:47:06 (#)
Okay, I successfully upgraded my backup to Hardy this time. Seems the problem is Nvidia drivers. Last time I already had them installed (and so it all broke), this time I did dist-upgrade first and now Adept warns me that nvidia-glx* will break my system. Quite annoying, since I had wanted to stay on Hardy as my regular boot, but no Nvidia driver is a deal-breaker.
November 23rd, 2007 at 08:40:23 (#)
[...] by wolfger on November 23, 2007 Well, the first Alpha release of Hardy Heron is 6 days away, but thanks to nixternal, I got Hardy up and running yesterday on my backup/test partition. So far, so good. Not really [...]