The Workshop

One of the cool features about Ubuntu is the way you can maintain your installed packages. And what about updating a whole distribution? It is pretty much as simple as it is with normal packages.

Yesterday I updated my Intrepid (8.1) development server to the new Jaunty (9.04) release with 4 easy steps:

1. Install the core of update-manager and the release upgrader (not aptitude) with the following command:
   

   sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

2. So now you’ve got the release upgrader installed, let’s upgrade your system:
   

   sudo do-release-upgrade

   Now the installer is might gonna ask you a couple of questions, depending on the installed packaged on your system:
   “Running services and programs that are using NSS need to be restarted, otherwise they might not be able to do lookup or authentication any more”

   Services to restart for GNU libc library upgrade include “rsync” and “cron” as defaults. If you don’t do too much of crazy things on your server, you can probably use the default values.

   NOTE: When it comes to remote server administration (through SSH), as Rugmonster pointed out at the #slicehost channel on Freenode, the ssh service will keep working as it is used to be. Also, even if sshd restarts, your existing connection won’t be killed.

3. After the upgrade process is done (took me about 15 minutes from Intrepid to Jaunty – this may vary depending on your connection speed and the number of packages installed) the installer will finish and reboot your system.
4. Log in to your system again through SSH (use your previous settings, those have been kept) and check your system information:
   

   lsb_release -a

   You should see something like this:

   No LSB modules are available.
   Distributor ID: Ubuntu
   Description: Ubuntu 9.04
   Release: 9.04
   Codename: jaunty

NOTE: I have to add that some people had to re-compile their MySQL binaries after the release upgrade. This happens when you have manually compiled binaries and not the official releases through apt-get. Then you might gonna need to recompile those after the upgrade process. I haven’t expected any problems myself, tho.