So… I tried to see if Krissa’s box could be upgraded from dapper to edgy purely from the GUI. This is ubuntu, it’s supposed to be all shiny and GUI and user-friendly, right? I poked, I prodded, I found nothing. Surely, I’m stupid; there must be some way to do this.
So I googled, and I found this article, which indicates that to do a GUI-based upgrade, you have to… open a terminal and pass special flags to update-manager.
I shudder to think of the amount of time spent on this. I’m not following Ubuntu development in the slightest right now, so maybe there is something I’m missing, but on the face of it, either upgrading your distro is purely a power user thing- in which case why build the functionality into the update-manager GUI at all- or it is an end-user thing- in which case, why do I need to open a terminal and google for magic flags?
Surely there is some rationale/explanation I’m missing here, but I have no idea what that might be.
[Edit: as was posted out in comments, Edgy is not ‘enterprisey‘, so update-manager won’t recommend upgrading from Dapper->Edgy, whereas it will for Edgy->Fiesty or Dapper->(whatever the next LTS release is.) Makes perfectly good sense.]
[Aside from this, by the way, I’m running edgy on my desktop box, and am very pleased with the slight but definitely visible improvement in boot time, and the every-six-months bunch of goodies, like a fresher and nicer f-spot, rhythmbox daap-y goodness, and (hopefully for krissa) better ipod support. Unfortunately I might not be able to use it on my own laptop for a while yet- we’ll see about that, I guess. I have to say that the fc6 videos look pretty swank, too. Am still looking forward to some distro claiming my heart by discussing support for tablet pcs out of the box :)
The point in the special flags needing to be passed for the Dapper -> Edgy upgrade is because Dapper is a LTS release. It is supported for twice as long as Edgy, so that is why they don’t want a notification in update-manager by default about Edgy. For the Edgy -> Feisty upgrade, a notification will appear in update-manager.
And ditto Dapper->(counts on fingers)G…something? That makes sense, I guess. Will update the post appropriately.
ALT F2
gksudo “update-manager -c”
What is non-gui about that?
Not accessible from a menu? Having to know a magical, undocumented flag? Having to google for what should be basic functionality? If you think alt+f2 + gksudo counts as GUI, you’ve been living in Linux land for way too long.
When the next LTS is out, I assume update-manager for Dapper will notify about that (but possibly not, as it would be a jump of 4 releases (possibly)).
Sorry, got my name wrong, I am really Bruce Cowan (not that that matters).
With this ‘software’ thing, we can fix things ;) Thanks again for the info, Bruce. I’d assume that it should still offer to update, even from Dapper- updating from revision to revision is supposed to be an Ubuntu/Debian feature, of course. Doesn’t matter to me personally, as we’ll likely all be Edgy shortly soon (as soon as I can figure out whether or not it’ll cope with my tablet.)
[…] tutaj: http://tieguy.org/blog/2006/10/28/adventures-in-so-close-yet-so-far/ (pogrubienie i pierwszy komentarz). Oraz https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyReleaseNotes “By […]