Painless upgrade

corblimey

My 8.04 install of Ubuntu is working fine and all that, but it's a 64 bit version and I want to upgrade to 8.10 of the 32 bit version. I know I'll have to reinstall all my apps, and all that, but has anyone got some good tips for the most painless way of what I suspect is a full re-install of Ubuntu?

CJackson

corblimey wrote: »

My 8.04 install of Ubuntu is working fine and all that, but it's a 64 bit version and I want to upgrade to 8.10 of the 32 bit version. I know I'll have to reinstall all my apps, and all that, but has anyone got some good tips for the most painless way of what I suspect is a full re-install of Ubuntu?

try this http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

An Fear Aniar

CJackson wrote: »

try this http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

In theory that method is supposed to work but in practice it always causes problems and you just have to end re-installing again anyway. Best way is to do a fresh install every time.

Corblimey, do you have a seperate /home partition?


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I am having problems with this. My system keeps telling me I am using the latest Ubuntu (8.04) when I want to updgrade to 8.10. I've followed all instructions.

Is it easier to just reinstall and use 8.10? I upgraded from 7.10 and it was quite messy.

An Fear Aniar

I think you'd be better off to download an iso and burn a live CD for yourself. Also, if you can, do the manual install and set up a separate /home partition. This makes subsequent upgrades much easier.


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I don't think I can have another partition.

I have the DellUtilities one, Windows, Ubuntu and a Ubuntu Swap drives mapped out.

corblimey

An Fear Aniar wrote: »

Corblimey, do you have a seperate /home partition?

Disregarding zaraba's blatant hijacking of my thread for the moment I didn't bother with the separate /home partition mostly because I didn't really think it was going to work the last time I installed it (I had failed a number of times due to bad disk, amd, etc etc). I'm guessing that I'll hose all my settings, etc. Can I backup the /home directory and just overwrite it later? I think that might be asking for trouble? I'm not so deep into Ubuntu that I might not just be better of with a clean install all over again, I guess.

An Fear Aniar

corblimey wrote: »

Disregarding zaraba's blatant hijacking of my thread for the moment I didn't bother with the separate /home partition mostly because I didn't really think it was going to work the last time I installed it (I had failed a number of times due to bad disk, amd, etc etc). I'm guessing that I'll hose all my settings, etc. Can I backup the /home directory and just overwrite it later? I think that might be asking for trouble? I'm not so deep into Ubuntu that I might not just be better of with a clean install all over again, I guess.

Probably not a good idea if you're moving from one version to a newer one because a lot of the apps may be newer versions once you've upgraded. This could cause conflicts which would make your life miserable. Just salvage what you can. If you have bookmarks, upload them to Foxmarks. If your email is Mozilla Thunderbird, you could archive your .mozilla folder in /home, that will preserve all your emails and contacts. If you're using an RSS reader there's a file you can export and it will save all your feeds.


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Just reinstalled there now. All good so far and many little problems seem to have been fixed.

Orion

Upgrading from a 64 bit version to a 32 bit version is just like having two accounts - it's just not done

8.04 64 will upgrade to 8.10 64 but not to 8.10 32. Consider the 64 bit and 32 bit as completely different operating systems so a reinstall is the only way forward.

I wasn't impressed with 8.04 64 bit. Have it running on another laptop.

Keeping the 32bit for the moment!

Orion

I've Mythbuntu 8.04 64 on my HTPC - not worth a ****e. I'm reinstalling to 8.10 32 shortly. 64 bit in Linux just like in Windoze just don't work well.