I accidently made myself update to Feisty earlier today. I think it started with an email from someone telling me that my iSight driver didn’t work for him, me deciding it was time to boot back into Linux and see what’s wrong and getting annoyed that Gtk+ on Dapper was several minor versions behind on the svn that I have installed on OS X.
See, it could be so easy. “sed -e s/dapper/feisty/g sources.list” and Debian all the way. Somehow, Ubuntu suffers from the Fedora disease where they fail to create proper update paths, although fortunately, Ubuntu is still lightyears behind on Fedora when it comes to providing a completely poor and crippled user experience for those of us that wish to not re-install from scratch every six months. Thumbs up here, sort of…
After dist-upgrade worked relatively well, and Feisty rebooted, I got no X and no virtual consoles. In short, I was in a running system with everything ready & working in front of me, just me not being able to enter a command in any way. Nice, so close, yet so far away. Seems that in the end, it was a combination of bug 95210, 89853 and a quirk in the update process that caused gdm to magically disappear (?).
Result: the webcam module for the iSight in Feisty is just svn trunk, i.e. it’s not iSight-aware, and works fine otherwise. Updated my (one-year-old!) patch against svn trunk and modified it to allow for both iSight and native UVC devices (they’re somewhat different in their USB data transfer protocol), re-sent to Laurent, let’s see if this goes better if I update again one year from now… What a waste of a my day.
I’m not an Ubuntu user, but I’ve read there’s an update tool available instead of just editing sources.list and it’ll run some grepmagic on changed configuration files …
Just FYI, but I don’t know much more.
Cheers
Thirst, the update manager (atm there is no cli alternative for this)
And second: there is no direct update from dapper to feisty available…you have to update to edgy first.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading
“Thirst, the update manager (atm there is no cli alternative for this)”
Yes there is, from 6.06 Edgy Eft upwards from the link you provided. I wonder if it differs from upgrade-manager in terms of problem solving though, so I would stick with that or the Kubuntu equivalent if you have X installed. The old Debian standby of dist-upgrade is definitely not recommended at all….
“
Network upgrade for Ubuntu servers (recommended)
If you run an Ubuntu server, you should use the new server upgrade system.
1.
Install update-manager-core:
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
2.
Launch the upgrade tool:
sudo do-release-upgrade
3.
Follow the on-screen instructions
“
As pointed out be several others, using update-manager-core is the way to go. It worked wonderfully for me, better than a few dist-upgrades I had done on Debian. Anyway, as the Ubuntu upgrade page clearly states that dist-upgrade is not soupported I wonder why you tried anyway…
even though dist-upgrade is not the supported way, I’ve updated my sister’s computer ever since I installed ubuntu on it (5.10) with the update-manager and I never ever had it to upgrade succesfully. Always had to finish the job by hand because for whatever reason it failed in the middle of the process.
Update Manager would have been the right way to go. It does things that a plain dist-upgrade doesn’t; sanely migrating your /etc/inittab etc. to the new init system is one of them.
And even in Debian-land, directly upgrading from Woody to Etch isn’t supported. I think Dapper to Feisty is supported, but only with update-manager.
It’s interesting how many people know about this so-called update-manager tool, even though it wasn’t installed, it wasn’t visible on my Dapper desktop, and there was no way for me to know in advance that it was the way to go. If dist-upgrade is not supported, it should have been disabled with a pointer to upgrade-manager in the error message.
Let’s not get me started on needing edgy in between…
Hi Ronald,
Because both Edgy and Feisty are not LTS (Long Term Support) distros, there is no automated upgrade notification. If you wait(ed) for the next LTS version, you will see an upgrade notification in your Dapper notification tray.
Update Manager is available from System->Administration->Update Manager
To get to Edgy from Dapper, you will need to invoke update-manager manually:
– Ctrl+F2.
– gksudo ‘update-manager -c -d’
You will then see the little update icon in your notification tray. Clicking this will show you the update manager, and give you the opportunity to upgrade to Feisty.
HTH
Kris
No. dist-upgrade should not be disabled. There are people that know what they are doing and they still use this method. 🙂
Check out this iSight patch which spawned meanwhile and aswell includes Firmware loading using the Kernel interface.
http://i-nz.net/projects/linux-kernel/
The only thing that bothers me is that no iSight support has made it upstream yet…
I’ve successfully upgraded from FC4 to FC5, and from FC5 to FC6, using yum (that is, doing the equivalent of apt-get dist-upgrade). For the FC4 to FC5 upgrade, there was breakage because FC4’s updates had a package that was newer than the equivalent in FC5, and it had a lot of dependencies. This was a pain to work around. However, FC5 to FC6 was completely smooth.
As time goes on, more and more people are using the yum upgrade path, so it’s getting smoother as it’s tested more.