How do I upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu? does a great job of explaining how to do a version upgrade. It also says "Upgrading Ubuntu works 99 times out of 100" which has not been my experience - I've had issues about 6 out of 6 times (I don't blame Ubuntu - I think my messing with my installation without a deep understanding of what I'm doing creates atypical problems). So I always image my entire system before I attempt an upgrade. Then I attempt the upgrade, and if it doesn't go well and my attempts to resolve the issues fail, I restore the system back to where I started. All of which takes a fairly long time.
So I'm wondering if there is a way to simulate a version upgrade so I can find out if there are going to be trouble areas and potentially address them prior to the actual upgrade.
For example, on my current 14.04.3 installation, apt-get check
and apt-get -f install
report no issues. But after I performed an upgrade to 14.10 last night, 3 or 4 packages were broken and I couldn't resolve the conflicts. Is there a way, before attempting an upgrade, to see what's wrong with an installation that might cause a problem when upgrading?
I imagine this could be useful information even if one doesn't upgrade - these "hidden" issues might be causing stability or performance issues...