[ale] my experience upgrading Ubuntu 10.04 - 10.10 - 11.04

[Ron Frazier]

Hi all,

Thanks to all who replied to my thread about not using Unity in Ubuntu 
11.04.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Ubuntu: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28operating_system%29  They say 
standard releases are supported for 18 months and, starting with 12.04, 
the LTS releases will be supported for 5 years.

Well, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade 3 computers from Ubuntu 
10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04 after backing them up.  This 
message goes beyond the subject of Unity and Gnome, so I decided to 
start a new thread.  I discovered some really interesting things about 
the upgrade process I thought I'd share.  One computer is done, the 
other two are in process.  I may just end up keeping 11.04 until 12.04 
comes out in case I want to get off the 6 month upgrade train.  
Everything I read tells me I don't want Unity, so I may not upgrade to 
11.10 right away, at least until I do more research on it.  On 11.04, I 
can still get my Ubuntu Classic desktop.

First, using the default settings, the download of the over 1000 upgrade 
packages is abysmal, enough to make you want to break things.  On the 
first machine, it took 2 hours to download each of the package sets for 
the two sequential upgrades I had to do.  I was considering doing bodily 
harm to some dishes, or else just falling asleep and falling out of the 
chair.  I then did some Googling around and found out the most amazing 
thing.  You can change the server it upgrades from.  Not only that, you 
can have it test over 300 of them to see which is fastest.  What an 
epiphany!

Here's how to do it:

Start Update Manager (Menu, System, Administration, Update Manager).
Click the settings ... button.
Enter your administrative password.

(Side note, I went to the Other Software tab and unchecked all my PPA's 
and additional software sources before upgrading.  Don't know for sure 
if it would cause a problem, but, since lots of those are based on the 
old distribution, I figured it would be a good idea.)

Go to the Ubuntu Software tab.
There is a line that says "Download From:" and the dropdown box probably 
says United States Server.
Click the dropdown box.
Click other ...
A "Choose a Download Server" window will appear.
Click the "Select Best Server" button.
The system will start probing each server in the list and calculating 
the fastest response.
Once it's done, one certain server will be highlighted.  In my case, it 
was Duke University.
If you like it's choice, click the Choose Server button.
You should then be back at the Software Sources window, which you can close.

After this, your updates will be fetched from this new server you 
picked.  I'm pretty sure you can use this for routine updates as well, 
so they will be fast, whether you are upgrading the OS or not.

The difference between the two was mind boggling.  My cable modem 
normally peaks out at about 24 Mbps.  For the first machine, I spent 4 
HOURS watching downloads at less than 100 K BYTES / s, which equates to 
about 1 Mbps.  After making this change on two other machines, I started 
upgrades on both.  As I said, they're still in progress.  However, the 
download part is done.  You have no idea how gratifying it was to see 
two machines simultaneously downloading data at over 1000 K BYTES / s, a 
full 10 X faster, almost saturating my internet pipe, AND, the progress 
graph on each said estimated completion time for the download of UNDER 
10 minutes.  That's about how long it took too.  WOW!

The upgrade process was pretty much automatic, except a few times it 
kept asking about whether I wanted to keep or discard certain 
configuration files.  Because of these questions, you can't just walk 
away.  The actual patching process takes 1 - 2 hours.  I didn't always 
know what to say.  I think I let it replace the sudoers config file and 
a few others and told it to keep the ntp and grub files.  Hopefully 
keeping those won't cause a problem, but I figured ditching them would 
cause more problems.

I have only a bit of experience with the one machine at the new rev 
level.  However, I am typing this message on it.  There are no obvious 
major things that blew up because of the upgrade.  I can say the ATI 
video card driver is working - YAY.  The swap file is working - YAY.  
The CPU temperature sensor is now working and wasn't before - YAY.  
Hibernate still fails - BOO.  The power management settings changed, so 
I changed them back - BOO.  I had to reinstall the Flash Player and I'll 
have to recheck it's settings - BOO.  And, the Firewall is not working - 
BOO.

So, it has been mostly painless, except for the very slow downloads 
initially, but not totally painless.  Going forward, I'm going to check 
on all the main applications I use, which I was doing for maintenance 
anyway, and see A) which ones work, B) which ones are receiving updates, 
and C) which ones had their settings changed.  Hopefully not too many 
will need tweaking.

Also, I've found another way to set the login screen to the Ubuntu 
Classic, if that's what you want.  Note, if you're running Unity, you'll 
have to figure out how to get to this screen.

Access Menu, System, Administration, Login Screen
Click the Unlock button.
Enter your administrative password.
At the bottom, there's a line that says "Select" and a drop down box 
then "as default session".
Set the dropdown box to Ubuntu Classic and close the window.

It should boot into Ubuntu Classic from then on.  You can also control 
whether there is a login sound and whether it auto logs in from here.

Well, overall, I'm liking the results, but it looks like I do have some 
homework to do making sure everything is working and is configured the 
way I like it.  Hope this info is helpful to others considering upgrades.

Sincerely,

Ron


-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com