Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) -> 6.04 (Dapper Drake)… Upgrade
Published February 13th, 2006 in MiscellaneousI am nothing if not adventurous, so I decided to try an in-box upgrade of my laptop from Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) to 6.04 (Dapper Drake). Dapper Drake is due for final release in April, so I suppose it is asking for trouble doing a dist-upgrade with apt-get 3 months before that release.
But, I gave it a go anyway, to see what would happen. I did not have a lot installed or a lot of data on my laptop, since I only recently switched to Ubuntu 5.10. I had to manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change references to breezy to dapper. Then I was able to proceed with the upgrade.
I have done in-box upgrades before with Debian, particularly from 3.0 to 3.1, so I was optimistic that it might work with Ubuntu from 5.10 to 6.04. Unfortunately, I broke my laptop. No clearer way of saying it. I think it may have been an issue with LVM, because my partition tables were completely messed up and while I could use the fixed ext3 partitions, my LVM partitions were unusable, where my root partition was. I was unable to fix it and had to reinstall 5.10 and completely delete and rewrite my partition table, this time without LVM.
That’s my experience on an IBM Thinkpad T20 laptop from circa 1999 / 2000. I think other people have had success with the upgrade and I may have just gotten unlucky. Either way, you are probably better off waiting for the official release in April, unless what you upgrade is a throwaway installation.
I decided to upgrade some packages (not a full dist-upgrade) to the Dapper version. MySQL 5 in particular. Some dependencies required installation, perhaps a dozen, so I accepted those. MySQL 5 was installed. But on the next reboot, the same thing happened again. This time /dev/hda1 was not found. It seemed quite bizarre.
I used my Ubuntu Live DVD to boot up the laptop. I checked the disk and /dev/hda1 was still there. I mounted it and decided to revert the grub menu.lst back to kernel 2.6.12-9. Lo and behold, my laptop could boot up again. Was it changing the kernel back? Was it mounting the disk? Was it just editing the grub menu.lst? I have no idea what resolved the issue. I would love to hear from someone who has an answer!
I ran into similar problems with an upgrade to Dapper from Breezy. I’m glad I found someone else who was unlucky becuase I was feeling left out! Anyways, I’m going to wait until the final release until I upgrade for fear of another meltdown.
Since I did my messing around, I have been unable to upgrade successfully from kernel 2.6.12-9 to 2.6.12-10. The same issue reoccurs with the disk not being found. I have to revert back to the older kernel. It’s not a big issue but I can’t help feeling that I have done permanent damage to my installation. A clean installation of Dapper might be the best advice in my case.
Well, I’m using Dapper on my laptop from flight2 and I’m pretty impressed. Except few problems (with networking in particular) everything is ok. But after your post I will probably wait with upgrading my office machine
I ended up in a situation where I could no longer upgrade the kernel. Every time I did, the laptop would refuse to reboot.
I have now started running Fedora Core 5. No problems with that to date.
Awesome items!! Give us the full lowdown along with loads of pictures when you get back.