I realize, with everything else I’ve written, that I have never actually outlined how to upgrade your machine between releases. I know I’ve posted about how NOT to upgrade, or how to upgrade during beta but never complete steps to upgrading your machine. For those of you that aren’t familiar with these steps read on. For the rest of you, I hope you’re about ready to upgrade to Feisty in just a few short weeks!
You can upgrade your machine in just a few short steps.
First, you’ll want to make sure that your machine is completely up-to-date on your current release. To do this you can run the following: (note: see my previous posts about automagic upgrading.)
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade && sudo aptitude autoclean
Once this is finished your machine should be completely up-to-date and you’re ready to upgrade. To start the upgrade process you can try one of the following methods:
ALT:F2 - gksudo "update-manager -c -d"
or you can do things manually by:
sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop (or kubuntu-desktop depending on your main GDM)
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
find/replace every instance of [current] (ie; dapper) with [future] (ie; edgy)
It might be helpful, if you missed it, to see my previous post on find/replace using Vim.
Once all instances of [current] are replaced with [future] (and remember you can only upgrade one version at a time) you can run the following:
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade && sudo aptitude autoclean
This will then check for the latest available versions, upgrade to them, upgrade to any additional packages and dependencies and then clean up after itself. This will take a while depending on your network connection!
Once these steps have finished you may also want to run the same command again, to make sure you haven’t missed anything. I have often found that I have needed to run the command 2x-3x after a reboot to get everything just the way it should be. Ooh, and as usual be safe and back your critical files up before you do something like this. You never know if you might run into trouble, and its a good idea to back things up anyway.
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