Nathan’s Blog

Back in 2005 I bought a large tower case and stuffed it full of hard drives to use as my home storage solution.  I’ve been running Ubuntu 6.06 on it since it was released, but figure its time to upgrade to 8.04 so I can use some of the newer packages that have come out in the last few years.

Ubuntu have a page describing the procedure:

1. Enable the “dapper-updates” repository.
2. Install the new “update-manager-core” package – dependencies include python-apt, python-gnupginterface and python2.4-apt.
3. Run “sudo do-release-upgrade” in a terminal window.
4. Follow the steps on the terminal window.

And that’s pretty much it. The only real flaw in the system is that any software configuration files that you have changed and Ubuntu have also changed, result in a prompt being shown asking how to resolve the conflict. This works pretty well with two minor flaws:

• Compared to dealing with merges in say Subversion, its very basic since there’s no actual merge functionality at all. You are shown the differences between the two files, but aren’t offered the chance to accept all non-conflicting changes.
• The upgrader does packages in a semi-random order which can take an hour or more; since the installer prompts you to resolve configuration conflicts during the installation of each package this happens at basically random points through the process. It would be more user friendly if it could group all packages with configuration conflicts together in time.

Fortunately though the upgrade has gone without a hitch and I can now have some fun trying out iSCSI.