How do I upgrade from 10.04 or 11.10 to 12.04?

Question

I am using Ubuntu 11.10.

Please outline the different ways I can upgrade to 12.04.

Answer 1

Summary

This answer summarizes the recommended community upgrade process.

You should always read the release notes for any potential issues that may affect your upgrade.

Backup

Before you start any upgrade process – ask yourself this question:

Can I afford to lose any/all my data such as documents and files?

If the answer is no - then backup your installation.

Upgrading Ubuntu works 99 times out of 100 – a backup will save you lots of frustration later if things do go wrong.

Comparison of backup tools

Graphics

If you have installed proprietary drivers from the Additional Drivers or Hardware Drivers window then these should be automatically upgraded with the Nvidia/ATI binary driver appropriate for 12.04

If you have downloaded and installed proprietary drivers manually directly from the manufacturers website then the recommendation is to remove these drivers first and revert to the open-source drivers before upgrading. Potentially what can happen is that a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file will remain after the upgrade and subsequently on first reboot, you will boot into a 'black screen'.

These questions describe the removal process:

1. How do I remove ATI/AMD Drivers downloaded from their site?

2. Remove nVidia driver and go back to Nouveau

PPAs

During the upgrade, any PPA sources you may have added will be automatically disabled. Generally, PPAs do not affect the upgrade process.

There are a couple of specific PPAs that could cause issues - x-swat and xorg-edgers. These PPAs should be removed via ppa-purge before upgrading

1. ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
2. xorg-edgers/ppa

How to Upgrade

Your 11.10 upgrade program will alert you of the new release and offer an upgrade. If this does not happen then see the trouble-shooting section below.

Please see the trouble-shooting section for the special case for LTS users between 12.04 and the release 12.04.1

The official ubuntu.com page has information:

• For desktop and server editions.

Immediately after a Ubuntu release, the download servers are extremely busy. Thus, if you can, we suggest to wait a few days if you want to upgrade.

Alternatively, download using a bittorrent client such as Transmission, the official desktop ISO torrent.

Upgrade over the Network

You can easily upgrade over the network with the following procedure.

1. Launch the update manager.
2. Click the Check button to check for new updates.
3. If there are any updates to install, use the Install Updates button to install them, and press Check again after that is complete.
4. A message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release.

For 10.04LTS users you need to check the "Release upgrade - Show new distribution releases" drop-down to make sure "Long term support releases only" is selected, and change it if otherwise. See the Trouble-shooting section below for more details. Please see the trouble-shooting section for the special case for LTS users between 12.04 and the release 12.04.1

1. Click Upgrade.

Follow the on-screen instructions.

See Also:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PreciseUpgrades for more information on some alternate methods of upgrading for certain cases.

From the technical overview:

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in update-manager into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '12.04' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a server system: install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade; and follow the on-screen instructions. Note that the server upgrade is now more robust and will utilize GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of e.g. dropped connection problems.

Upgrading by using the CD or USB image

If you are using 10.04 LTS or 11.10 and you either insert the live CD or boot from the live CD to start installing it will give a option of upgrading to 12.04. It will automatically detect installed applications and install the updated version of your applications also.

If you download an ISO, the recommendation is to perform a md5sum check to ensure both the ISO downloaded and the burned CD are valid.

• Upgrade from 10.04 LTS (here shown with dual boot):

NOTE: Upgrades from 10.04 to 12.04 are not activated yet, see this question for more detail:

• "No new release found" when upgrading a from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS

• Upgrade from 11.10
  

Upgrading using the command line:

11.10 users

• Run do-release-upgrade in a terminal

10.04 users

• edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=lts

• Run do-release-upgrade in a terminal

Troubleshooting

If your 10.04 or 11.10 update-manager does not prompt you to upgrade, then check your software sources to see if it is set to "Never". If it is then change the value to "Long Term Support Releases Only" (10.04 LTS) / "For any new version" (11.10):

^{for 10.04 LTS}

^{for 11.10}

According to Ubuntu Engineering Foundations team manager Steve Langasek:

Upgrades between LTS releases are not enabled by default until the first point release, 12.04.1, scheduled for July. It is recommended that most LTS users wait until then before upgrading to 12.04.

If you choose to upgrade before then, you can pass the -d option to the upgrade tool, running do-release-upgrade -d or update-manager -d, to upgrade from vanilla 10.04 to 12.04.

See this Q&A for further details:

"No new release found" when upgrading a from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS

Answer 2

My method, based on half a decade's experience of painful ubuntu upgrades, is different. I'm not trolling, just sharing the methods I use.

Of course you can't afford to lose all your data, so yes, back it up. But I start from an earlier question: can you afford to not be able to access your data because everything's broken? If not, then this method might be for you. You need a little free disk space.

I keep 2 operating system primary partitions (and a separate one for data, swap...). So, for example, I have Natty at /dev/sda1, and have been running Precise Beta in /dev/sda2.

Then I choose an option: upgrade or clean install. As Linux Mint point out, an upgrade never feels like a clean install, but sometimes you want that.

For a clean install you just plug in your new USB stick and tell it to install in /dev/sda2, pointing /home to your existing home partition.

To do an upgrade I image sda2 from sda1. There are many ways to do this, fsarchiver is good, or plain ol' cp or tar will do the trick. Once I've made identical copies of all files in the spare partition, I mount it and edit /etc/fstab to update the UUIDs for the new partition or it will get confused. Then I run grub-update and next time I reboot grub offers me 2 choices. I check that I can boot either. Then do your upgrade as above.

Further warning: new desktop versions tend to mangle old desktop config files. So you can end up with the old and new systems being broken. If you have the disk space, cp -ar /home/{youruser,newname} and point the new user's HOME to this new path in /etc/passwd.

Having 2 OS partitions gives me a fallback; If something in the new system (might be a driver, a bug, a missing app...) is affecting productivity, I can at least go back to where I was. It's obviously not for the feint-hearted or noob.

Answer 3

Use Rinzwinds answer if you need a GUI-way to upgrade. If you need a CLI-way to upgrade, you should take a look at this page. The howto is from last year, but it should still be valid for 12.04. As soon as 12.04 will be released, this way should work.

And to answer your other question: 11.10 came AFTER 11.04. The first number is always the year (in this case: 11 means 2011), the second number ist the month or release (04 means April, 10 means October).

Last, but not least: As Rinzwind told you, you should wait until release and not upgrade to it while it's in beta. Unless you know what you are doing, of course.

Answer 4

“Never mess with your stable” is a lesson that I have learnt and is a mantra that I hold close to my heart. Especially when you have a good choice not to mess with your stable, you simply shouldn’t mess with it. Hence, I left my 10.04 unscathed and installed my 12.04 in another partition. Here is a screen shot of my hard disk :

I needed to have all the softwares that were there on 10.04 to be installed on my new 12.04.

1. First you have to know which all packages are installed in your 10.04. For that you can do

   sudo dpkg --get-selections "*" > pack_file

After running that, you will have the names of all the packages in 10.04 in the file called ‘pack_file’.

Transfer that file to 12.04 and run the following commands

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo dpkg --set-selections < pack_file
• sudo apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

This will fetch all the packages as well as their dependencies and install it on your system. I had to download about 2GB of data but was at peace that my distro won’t get ruined.

It was 10.04 fro me but the approach would work on any version. Hence you can upgrade to the latest without "upgrade"ing. :)

Do refer to this : http://sosaysharis.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/upgrading-to-ubuntu-12-04-the-way-i-did-it/

Answer 5

You should also remove ttf-mscorefonts-installer before upgrading.

The reason is, that the upgrade process might get stuck on asking you to acceppt the EULA.

For workaround if the upgrade is already stuck, see this answer: http://askubuntu.com/a/126082/55343