Laurent’s Weblog

Having switched my father to Ubuntu Dapper Drake one year ago (after a last unrecoverable problem on Windows), it was time this month to upgrade: Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 isn’t supported any more (more than 18 moths old).

I began a marathon to upgrade the system 3 times :

- Dapper to Edgy (6.10)

- Edgy to Feisty (7.04)

- Feisty to Gutsy (7.10)

For the upgrade, i did this from the Ubuntu repositories on the internet.

After several Time-Out connections on french mirrors, i chose the Swiss one.

Upgrading is done in 5 steps :

1) Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list, and change all the references to the current release by the next one.

For example, in the first upgrade from dapper to edgy , launch the following command : sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

And for the next upgrade : sudo sed -e ’s/\sedgy/ feisty/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

Finally , last upgrade to Gutsy ; sudo sed -e ’s/\sfeisty/ dutsy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

2) Update the source list using the following command : sudo apt-get update

3) Upgrade using the following command : sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

4) Finally check the install (after 90 inutes in my case) and finish install by the following commands :

sudo apt-get -f install

sudo dpkg –configure -a

5) Reboot the machine so that the new installation takes effect.

Then, i spent some time to check all applications installed one year ago :

- First i check application coming with Ubuntu :Firefox (upgraded to 2.0.0.8) , Mail Evolution, Instant messenging with Pidgin (for MSN, Yahoo, and GTalk) , OpenOffice (2.3) , XSane (Scanner) : all was OK.

I upgraded two applications : Skype and Picasa.

I checked Google Earth.

I installed new ones : Digikam (to import photos from the camera) , Amarok (Mp3 player, Podcasts, Web radios) and VLC .

My father’s happy with Ubuntu for one year now (he lost his fear for viruses for example, and hadn’t any outage with this very stable system this last year), and more happy today. Finally, he’s not an advanced user and does what common people do with their computer (Internet, mail, Photos, instant messenging and audio conferencing, Documents, listening music, watching videos).

Like the Mac , when you follow the track, you don’t go back.