> On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 17:10 -0400, rrloria wrote: >> Maybe someone can help me. >> >> I'm new to Linux and need some advice. >> >> I have an older laptop where someone installed Ubuntu 7.10 on. >> >> I tried it out and I like it. >> >> Now I want to upgrade from 7.10 to the latest Ubuntu 9.04. Then I found >> out on another website that I can't do that directly. I have to do a >> new install and if I install it on my hard drive where 7.10 is I will >> lose all my programs.
If you haven't installed anything proprietary that isn't part of Ubuntu then really what you're saying is that you'd loose your installed program choices. Before reinstalling or upgrading, you can get a list of what programs you had installed via the command dpkg --get-selections > my_ubuntu_selections.txt and then emailing that text file to yourself. Then if you want to reinstall the newer version of Ubuntu directly you'll have the list of what was installed to allow installing anything missing through the package manager. >> A friend said he thinks there is a way that I can back up some files and >> folders on 7.10 that hold my programs to an external hard drive. Then >> he said I could do a new install of 9.04 on the internal hard drive, >> overwrite 7.10, then copy the saved files and folders from the external >> hard drive that has my program files and folders saved from 7.10 to the >> new 9.04 installation. I'm assuming that these are not programs that reside in your own home directory and that they were installed from Ubuntu using the normal package management tools. If that's the case then I really don't recommend trying to copy the old 7.10 programs back to the new 9.04 installation, for several reasons. - the package management tools wouldn't know about the files you copy back; this means that upon an Ubuntu update you could run into trouble - the old programs might have security issues the new versions of the same programs don't (like Firefox) - the underlying libraries the programs require may have changed in the new version of Ubuntu such that the old programs may not fully work as they did before >> How would I do this? >> >> What folders and files have to be backup and how do I reinstall them >> in in 9.04? >> >> Does that completely restore my old programs from 7.10 to 9.04? >> >> Are there any problems when you do this? >> >> Any advice you guys would have would be great. >> >> Please keep it simple since I'm just a beginner. >> >> If anyone has step-by-step instructions that would be helpful. >> >> -rr In practice I think it would be too difficult to do properly. I wouldn't want to attempt it. On Fri, September 11, 2009 10:43 am, Allen wrote: > Since no-one has answered you so far, I'll post this. Disclaimer: I'm a > novice level Linux user, not an expert like others in MHVLUG. I > multiboot Fedora and Ubuntu. I run Fedora over 95% of the time, so I'm > not too familiar with Ubuntu. > > One area where Ubuntu is way ahead of Fedora is with release upgrades. > To upgrade from Fedora n to Fedora n+1, a reinstall is recommended. A > release upgrade can be done through the Fedora package manager (Yum), > but it is discouraged. SELinux might be part of why, but another big issue is the method RPMs upgrade config files -- you have to save the log of the upgrade to a text file and read over it carefully, because that's the only notification that RPM found differences between config files and dropped a <file>.rpmnew next to the old config file -- and after the upgrade the old config file may not be compatible with the new program. > With Ubuntu, release upgrades from Ubuntu n to > Ubuntu n+1 are supported by the Ubuntu package manager, Apt. When > upgrading this way, your programs are preserved. > > In your case, you want to update from Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 9.04. You > want to preserve your programs. I suggest you investigate whether this > can be accomplished via release upgrades. Check if it is possible to do > a release upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04. Then from 8.04 to 8.10. Then from > 8.10 to 9.04. (You have to enable release upgrades in the update > manager.) It should be possible to upgrade Ubuntu this way, but I've only done it on Debian rather than Ubuntu, so I don't know if there are any known issues in the process. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Sept 2 - Linux and HDTV Oct 7 - TBD Nov 4 - Google Wave
