Mostly out of curiosity, but also for a change of pace, I installed Ubuntu 6.06.1 on the Pavilion and tried to jump straight to 8.04.
It … didn’t work quite right. I got a lot of damaged packages and aptitude couldn’t resolve a lot of dependencies. A couple of dpkg -a commands, a couple of apt-get install -f commands, and still things were generally fractured.
When I finally got back a terminal prompt that didn’t follow an error message of some kind, I rebooted and was left at a terminal prompt, with no GUI and some crazy bash messages.
Oh well. It was fun for a little bit. I do like to see things break. Except I really wanted it to work this time. I was hoping that a leap between LTS releases would go smooth.
It was nice to see Dapper again though. I haven’t installed that version since … since Edgy was released, I guess. It has a much more definite “presence” than I remembered. There were a few things I was accustomed to that weren’t there, but otherwise, it all worked (except for the proprietary ATI driver, and the wireless card, of course 😉 ). For a little while. 😈
I don’t think anyone is to blame for a failed upgrade that tries to leapfrog over two years of software updates, but I don’t know if anyone else making the same jump would be successful. As always, a clean install is my suggestion.
P.S.: By the way, I just realized that the title of this post doesn’t read quite right. I mean “fails me” like “I can’t quite understand this,” as in, “This calculus problem fails me.” I don’t want to infer Linux has let me down, as someone quite slyfully mentioned in a quick e-mail. That would be somewhat hypocritical for me to say. 😉
Motho ke motho ka botho 
It is supposed to work. I know there was testing done before release. If you haven’t uninstalled yet and can still get the logs, it worth filing a bug.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUpdateManager
Dapper isn’t meant to upgrade to Hardy quite yet – the upgrade is intended to be from 6.06.1 -> 8.04.1 (when it is released), I think.
@andrewsomething: Nuts, I should have thought to keep the logs. I’ll try it again in the next couple of days, and if it fails again, I’ll definitely try to supply some information. I usually blame myself when things like this don’t go as suspected.
@oneperson: I’ll keep that in mind if I try to duplicate the same errors. I’ll also make sure I strictly follow any LTS-to-LTS upgrade instructions I find.
Just curious: Did you upgrade the packages in Dapper before upgrading?
btw since when have releases had a number after the month?
(ie 6.06.something)
Is there a terminal command to show what sub-version you’re on?
@johnraff
Only the LTSs get point releases. Hardy’s is already scheduled (I can’t recall the date) so as to pick up the Gnome point release and FF3 Final ect…
Pingback: My Hardy disappointment « Motho ke motho ka botho
I did an upgrade from dapper to hardy on a pent mmx, it was my first real foray into the world of linux so i had no clue what i was doing… i’d installed a dapper server, i wanted to try out a web browser called “netsurf” and to do this i summised i would add all the hardy repos to the source list and go the sudo update && upgrade . from memory i got lots of error codes (and work arounds i found on the net) the most memorable was ncurses and fdutils there was a reaccuring problem with those packages though oneday an update did something that seemingly fixed it. netsurf didn’t seem to work properly but the switch to hardy updated x window-system-core to xorg which seemed to fix a heap of things, still the end result was a pretty disfunctional and peculiar OS. i still have the hard drive in the drawer of my desk oneday i’ll revisit and see if i can fix it up.