Ubuntu Made It Almost Easy Enough to Upgrade?

Tripp Black  June 21 2010 07:25:00 PM

Today is the first time after using Ubuntu for several years that I tried to update using the Update Manager. Our scanning workstation (it's original use) has been on Hardy back when Hardy was new. We upgraded it to Lucid (10.04), and it was almost too simple.

There were only two parts of it that even required you to think:
Part I:
Starting it. To upgrade instead of update Ubuntu, you have to add a flag to the Update Manager and run from Terminal. A button on the Update Manager would be a nice improvement.
I had to:
1. Start Terminal.
2. At the prompt issue the command: update-manager --devel-release

Part II:
The next section where you had to think was the Installing Packages. Several times it stopped installing to ask what do do about all my manually updated configuration docs.
So basically, I choose the side by side comparison, I looked for the lines with the > and see what was different, and I choose to keep, merge, or overwrite my old/current configurations.

I chose to keep my SMB and NFS configs and throw away/replace my printer (CUPS) and several others that really were not so "manually" configured.

Since the upgrade obviously updated the kernel, it asked for a reboot this time. First time since I installed it. Not bad.

My only other gotcha was that we all share and access this workstation remotely over VNC. Since I only kept the SMB and NFS configs, I had to setup the remote control preferences again... oh well.

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