Upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy Heron
I’m currently in the process of upgrading Ubuntu on my primary machine from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron and thought I’d chime in with some upgrade commentary while the 2 hour download process is underway.
So far thanks to the upgrade tool the process has been extremely straightforward. By selecting System –> Administration –> Update Manager and then Check For Updates I was informed that a new version of the distro was available and by clicking upgrade I was taken to the upgrade tool.
Beginning with some general information (not shown here) I was able to read through the basics of what I was getting myself into, as well as locate support resources should they become necessary. After a quick perusal of the release notes I was fairly confident nothing in the upgrade would pose an adverse impact on my existing configuration. The only potential exception seems to be VirtualBox, which has no version for Hardy Heron yet; so I’m not sure what will happen once the upgrade is complete. (More on my experiences with VirtualBox here.)
The upgrade process is divided into 6 main stages:
- Preparing to upgrade
- Setting new software channels
- Getting new packages
- Installing the upgrades
- Cleaning up
- Restarting the computer
As of right now (12:30 am) I am in the middle of stage 3, when the upgrade tool needs to download 800MB worth of new files - totally 1158 files in the installation. This process will ultimately take 2.5 hours or so on my connection, which is 1500 kbps.
This represents the bulk of the process. Realistically you could start the download and walk away for a while, but in my case I’ve opted to stick around for the bulk of it to watch what’s happening and capture screen shots to properly document the process.
Given this is an upgrade that is making fundamental changes to my system it’s wise to keep an eye on everything you’re prompted to read. For example between Stage 2 and Stage 3 a screen appears (shown here) that outlines exactly what will change on your system. In my case this read:
“68 packages are going to be removed. 201 new packages are going to be installed. 957 packages are going to be upgraded.
You have to download a total of 813M. This download will take about 2 hours 46 minutes with your connection.
Fetching and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the download has finished the process cannot be cancelled.
To prevent data loss close all open applications and documents.“
Following this notice was a long list of every file that will be effected by the upgrade, including what is removed, added and updated. Start Upgrade begins the download.
I’ll update more as the process progresses.
Update (8:30 am): Wow it’s been over 8 hours now and my download still hasn’t finished yet! I’m interpreting this as a sign of tremendous interest by the community and a lot of concurrent downloads. From the perspective of Linux and Ubuntu specifically this is a great sign; from my perspective it’s prolonging the installation dramatically. Oh well, the best things come to those who wait.
Update (8:00 pm): After taking the entire night to download - presumably due to massive download traffic from other Ubuntu fans - the download process finally completed at around 10 am this morning. As expected, this constituted the bulk of the upgrade process - by far. Had the new version not only just launched the same day it would have taken a fraction of the time to download that it had.
Once the download completed it immediately began the installation process, and began to apply the changes. This portion of the upgrade took approximately 45 minutes and had a few important prompts regarding what to do with existing configuration files. I imagine this may differ between Ubuntu instances depending on what customisation has been done.
In my case I was asked whether I wanted to do with smb.conf, apache2.conf, and php.ini. There were several options available here, and to be honest I don’t remember what they all said; however in all cases I chose “keep the local version currently installed.”
Finally after a brief clean-up process which included the option to remove obsolete packages the machine restarted and the process was complete.
All in all I give the process a solid A for ease and simplicity, with a few points (but not many) deducted for the length of the download process - but as I said that’s as much a sign of the distro’s popularity as anything else.
Screenshots:
References:
June 1st, 2008 at 6:40 am
I just upgraded my distro of feisty fawn to Gusty Gibbon…i guess i fell a little behind. anyways the time it took downloading was about 1 hour for me but the upgrade process is quite another story. I noted the long pause when it read something about “setting up scrollkeeper” ? this pause lasted about 30 min. I feared the worst! I can’t log into yahoo messenger either but other than that this is cool! Higher resolution for the wide screen too! I usually wait a month or two when a new distro is out of the beta phase and keep an eye on threads and ubuntu forms to see how good it is before going about upgrading.