Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04

I'm a little embarrassed to say this but this is the first time I've upgraded from one version to another. In the past, I would always go the way of a fresh install, a nasty habit I picked up from my Windows days. Unfortunately, it's something I never managed to shake off. Until now, that is.

But with the new release of Jaunty Jackalope, I thought I'd give it a shot. I was already pretty happy with the settings on my laptop running Intrepid Ibex. An upgrade would save me the hassle of reconfiguring everything.

And you know what? The upgrade worked without any major hitches.

Alright, to be honest, I did have to tweak a couple of things (more on that later), but by and large, the upgrade went smoothly. I gotta hand it to the Ubuntu team, the design of the upgrade process is slick and easy.

There's two ways to do the upgrade: over the network through Synaptic, and through a local copy of the Alternate Installation disk. The difference only happens in the beginning. After the first few steps, they converge.

I tried the Synaptic network upgrade first, but decided to abort it on account of a slow network. Regardless, the process is almost idiot-proof. When you fire up Synaptic, you'll see a notice for the new version, alongside an Upgrade button.

What follows next is additional info.


Then, Ubuntu downloads the two files which consist the upgrade tool. The files are relatively small and the download finished quickly.



At this point, the network upgrade and the CD-ROM upgrade now converge. I did let the network upgrade run a bit until I realized it was a Bad Idea. I cancelled the operation, and Ubuntu rolled back to 8.10.

I then decided to download the Alternate Install CD. Once done, I mounted it locally via

sudo mount -o loop /home/dodgie/Desktop/ubuntu-9.04-alternate-i386.iso /media/cdrom0/

On the root of the Alternate Install CD is an executable called cdromupgrade. Invoking the program:

gksu ./cdromupgrade

And it brought me back to the point which you see now. The rest of the pictures are pretty much self-explanatory. Not much more to do except just to answer a couple of prompts.

My next post will be about the minor hiccups I mentioned earlier. Even those could not dampen my enthusiasm for the breezy process.

Ubuntu rocks!