[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu 12.04->14.04 upgrade gone awry

Omar Eljumaily omar at omnicode.com
Sat Aug 30 14:37:17 PDT 2014


Major version upgrades are always problematic.  Centos recommended a 
full reinstall up until their 6 to 7 update.  There's a coding reason 
for this.  You don't want people coding for legacy issues.  It makes 
more sense to focus on making better, more stable features than to worry 
about yesterday.

Regarding major version updates on my suggestion of a Linux Office 
Initiative, I'd tend to lean towards doing full reinstalls and focus on 
automatically updating config files for servers.  This is invariably the 
real issue anyway, old config files and old drivers.  It makes more 
sense to take it step by step and look at the packages individually.  I 
doubt a single update script can deal with all the different 
permutations of thousands of packages updating from millions of 
different config alternatives.

If you have a running business server, you're going to have to do a 
trial run on some sort of mirror anyway.  A better process would be to IMO:

1. Set up a new server
2. Install all your packages
3. Copy/merge the old config files (through some sort of automated 
script preferably)
4. Copy the old data (also through an automated script)

Client machines are entirely different.  It's probably safe to do 
automatic updates on them, although Windows hasn't done graceful 
software upgrades since Windows XP.

Omar


On 8/29/2014 9:19 PM, Christopher Wagner wrote:
> Hi Mitch, you might try renaming ~/.config also.
>
> I'm running 12.04 LTS now, and dreading doing the 14.04 upgrade. I 
> just did the Hardware Enablement Stack upgrade, which went fairly 
> well, except trashing the proprietary AMD drivers on my system.  Had 
> to remove and reinstall them and then all was well.
>
> - Chris
>
> On 08/29/2014 08:57 PM, Mitch Patenaude wrote:
>> I don't know why I always forget how painful the upgrade process is, 
>> but I've managed to once again render my ubuntu machine almost 
>> unusable, and I'm hoping that somebody here can help.
>>
>> I'll spare you the details other than to say after much hacking about 
>> with apt-* and dpkg I've managed to make it boot, and can even get 
>> into a window manager by setting the defaults to kdm and kde.  The 
>> problem is that I don't like KDE, and would much rather use some 
>> gnome based desktop, but they all wedge on login.  I can't find 
>> anything useful in /var/log/Xorg.log or /var/log/syslog.
>>
>> I've tried removing (well, moving to a different directory) ~/.gnome* 
>> and ~/.gtk*, but that didn't help.
>>
>> Any other ideas out there?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>   - Mitch
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at nblug.org
>> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at nblug.org
> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20140830/23921557/attachment.html>


More information about the talk mailing list