Re: How to upgrade in place from 16.10 unity to 17.04 gnome

2017-05-02 Thread Brian Burch

Thanks Marius,

This is short top-post because I won't respond inline to your valuable 
comments and suggestions at the moment. However, I didn't want you think 
I wasn't paying attention! I am grateful for your input.


I often run virtual machines on that particular system, so I ought to be 
able to do a clean install under unity to get both full package lists, 
because I have now upgraded my desktop system in-place to 17.04.


Unfortunately, that particular machine dropped dead suddenly at the 
weekend and it looks as if I need a new computer (it was 12 years old). 
Once I have that unplanned activity sorted out, I'll let you know how I 
get on with the desktop change.


This laptop runs ubuntu studio 17.04, with lightdm and xfce4, so I 
couldn't easily use it to test (besides, I need to do some problem 
determination on why bcmwl-kernel-source has broken my laptop wifi!).


Don't hold your breath, but I WILL reply to you properly once my 
technical life is back under control.


Thanks again,

Brian

p.s. your suggestions are OK for me, but not for most of the ordinary 
users. It's a pity we can't come up with something safe and easy.



On 27/04/17 22:45, Marius Gedminas wrote:

On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 02:17:26PM +1000, Brian Burch wrote:

On 17/04/17 18:10, Pander wrote:

To remove Unity, I simply use dpkg -P packagenames. When that list
becomes long from many dependencies, I put the output of that
through grep to get all the depending packages and cat those to a
file. Edit the file (vim and a lot of Shift-j) and put dpkg -P at
the beginning. I use the same trick for ouput of dpkg -l|grep -v ^ii

Of course, check if those lists of package names are okay to purge
before doing bulk purges. Some packages are tricky, see my post a
while back on Unity dependencies.


Thanks for your suggestion, Pander. I did something fairly similar to that
in the past. If I decide to go ahead this time, then I will follow your plan
because it seems simpler than what I did before.

However, I was hoping to receive advice that would be attractive and useful
to people who are not as confident as us with these low-level tools.

Am I correct in thinking the "old method" of installing gnome-desktop
alongside unity has become too complex to be worth trying?


Have you tried it?

I did that a long time ago and it worked for me.  I haven't had the
chance to try it lately.

Installing the gnome metapackage and removing the unity metapackage
ought to suffice, IMHO.  You might need to hunt down some other packages
that differ between Unity and GNOME (e.g. the bootsplash theme).

If I weren't a lazy person, I'd install both in two virtual machines,
then compare the lists of installed packages (e.g. dpkg -l) so I would
know which ones to install and remove to turn one into the other.


I tried "sudo dpkg --purge --dry-run unity" (-P is the same as --purge) on
my xenial system "just for fun", but it bombed out with a "too many
dependencies" error. However, it didn't list ANY of them!


dpkg is too low-level for this; don't use it.  apt purge exists these
days, and it deals with dependencies correctly.

(AFAIU the only reason to remove/purge Unit packages is in case they
install some system-wide gsettings override files that change some GNOME
settings defaults to Unity defaults.  )


Perhaps I should just wait for the next ubuntu release and hope there will
be a more straightforward conversion path?


A full reinstall is always a good way to test your backup completeness
;)

Marius Gedminas



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Re: How to upgrade in place from 16.10 unity to 17.04 gnome

2017-04-19 Thread Brian Burch

On 17/04/17 18:10, Pander wrote:

To remove Unity, I simply use dpkg -P packagenames. When that list becomes long 
from many dependencies, I put the output of that through grep to get all the 
depending packages and cat those to a file. Edit the file (vim and a lot of 
Shift-j) and put dpkg -P at the beginning. I use the same trick for ouput of 
dpkg -l|grep -v ^ii

Of course, check if those lists of package names are okay to purge before doing 
bulk purges. Some packages are tricky, see my post a while back on Unity 
dependencies.


Thanks for your suggestion, Pander. I did something fairly similar to 
that in the past. If I decide to go ahead this time, then I will follow 
your plan because it seems simpler than what I did before.


However, I was hoping to receive advice that would be attractive and 
useful to people who are not as confident as us with these low-level tools.


Am I correct in thinking the "old method" of installing gnome-desktop 
alongside unity has become too complex to be worth trying?


I tried "sudo dpkg --purge --dry-run unity" (-P is the same as --purge) 
on my xenial system "just for fun", but it bombed out with a "too many 
dependencies" error. However, it didn't list ANY of them!


I turned on --debug=400 and saw a partial list, but couldn't get "2>&1" 
redirection to work properly under sudo.


"dpkg -l | grep -i unity" gives a long list of packages... do you 
recommend any of them as a starting point to drag down the whole tree in 
a few big sections, or should I stuff them all into a purge packages file?


Perhaps I should just wait for the next ubuntu release and hope there 
will be a more straightforward conversion path?


Regards,

Brian

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How to upgrade in place from 16.10 unity to 17.04 gnome

2017-04-17 Thread Brian Burch
There is a lot of historical advice on this subject relating to earlier 
versions of ubuntu, but a lot of it is out of date.


I have switched my own systems from unity to gnome in the past, but gave 
up a few releases ago because unity had improved to the point where 
living with it was better than the pain of switching desktop.


I suspect there will be quite a few users who find themselves in a 
similar situation to me, so perhaps we could start with a nice clean slate?


As background, I did a clean install of ubuntu 64-bit desktop 16.10 onto 
a separate partition and kept my working 32-bit 16.04 LTS system. Just 
creating the spare partition on my all-raid LVM system took a lot of 
time and care. Then, once I had the new system working, it took a huge 
amount of time and messing about to install and configure all my 
applications in their 64-bit versions. Eventually, I had something I 
could work with, so I deleted and re-absorbed the "spare" partition. I 
definitely don't want to go through that sort of process again to 
install ubuntu gnome 17.04!


In "the old days" it was enough to install the gnome-desktop 
meta-package and select gnome from the login panel. As time went by, 
things got more complicated, but I don't need to repeat all that history.


I was quite sorry to read Mark Shuttleworth's interview about the future 
demise of unity - it was a worthy ambition. However, I was very pleased 
to read the announcement:-


https://ubuntugnome.org/ubuntu-gnome-17-04-released/

It seems I could simply be patient and my desktop will be automatically 
upgraded (along with everyone else) in year from now. However, I would 
like to circumvent a few annoying unity bugs and upgrade 17.04 in place.


Is it as simple as changing /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a new 
repository, "apt-get update/upgrade" and then "do-release-upgrade". 
Would that remove unity and install gnome properly?


I would be very grateful for advice that applies to my current situation.

Thanks for being there!

Brian

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