is it possible to upgrade from CD?

[dep]

Rather than do multiple big downloads or experiment with tools with which I'm not familiar, I'm wondering if it is possible to point a system upgrade to the Jaunty CD. It seems that this ought to be possible; I may even at one time known how to do it. But either I never knew or have forgotten.

So. Can a system upgrade -- as opposed to clean install -- be done from CD?

Thanks.

[pansz]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

Rather than do multiple big downloads or experiment with tools with which I'm not familiar, I'm wondering if it is possible to point a system upgrade to the Jaunty CD. It seems that this ought to be possible; I may even at one time known how to do it. But either I never knew or have forgotten.
So. Can a system upgrade -- as opposed to clean install -- be done from CD?
Thanks.

I've been using kubuntu on more than 3 computers for more than 3 years, and I'd tried almost all kinds of upgrade methods.

What I can tell is: upgrade from CD is possible but generally it is very buggy and a buggy upgrade is useless since a system upgrade should be rock solid.

The reason is simple: kubuntu CD contains only a very very small part of programs, and in 99.99% of cases your working system will have more packages than the CD provided. if you disconnect the internet and upgrade only from CD, that would result in lots of broken packages.

Anyway, a 9.04 CD is simply a snapshot of repository in April and the repository updates everyday, if you upgrade in May then almost all packages have been upgraded, it would be much better to download from the internet than to use the CD. ——you should *avoid* using the CD unless you're installing on a fresh computer.

If all you want is to save bandwidth: I recommend you setup a caching proxy server. for example, you can setup a squid server, set the disk cache to be 2GB+ and maximum cached file size to 100MB+, then you can export http_proxy=http://your.server.name:3128/ and run sudo do-release-upgrade on all of your computers.

[barbolani]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

I've not tried the 9.04 upgrade yet, but my last 4 upgrades were done from the CD. From my point of view, there at least three reasons for wanting to upgrade from CD

Saves bandwidth. Of course, the packages outside the CD will be downloaded anyway, and this is the time where you realize how many absoloutely wonderful things you've added to the standard distro over time. But at least some of them will be copied form the CD.

Saves time. At least the part that reads from CD runs faster. And you can burn many CD's and do it on many machines at the same time (guess this one belongs to the "saves bandwidth" section as well) Before using the CD for upgrades I had to wait something like 4 hours for an upgrade. With the CD the upgrade time is more reasonable, in the order of less than 2 hours.

Is safer. There is at least some risk of your upgrade being stopped if your mirror of choice is saturated. And just after a new release this is much more likely to happen. I'm not sure at which point a crashed upgrade can be restarted. Probably an upgrade stopped during the download stage is not very difficult to fix. I prefer not to know that.

As a neat trick, my last upgrades were done from an ISO file mounted on the hard disk, so they were really really fast in that stage (several times faster than if I were using a CD)

[dep]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

are you talking an upgrade or a full clean install? i'm thinking of maintaining my settings rather than reinventing them following install.

[barbolani]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

Upgrade

[dep]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

would you describe how you pointed the package manager at the CD? it would be a useful thing to know.

thanks.

[barbolani]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

I have not tried yet, as my time is currently devoted to play with the Netbook Remix (from where I'm posting this) But I plan to follow the advice at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgr...rnate%20CD/DVD.

[mchuskie]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

I can confirm, having done so myself a couple of days ago, that it really is as simple as running "sudo /media/cdrom0/cdromupgrade" with the alternate CD in the drive, and then going to make a few cups of tea

[barbolani]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

Could not wait and tried it. As JamesM says, it is perfectly safe to follow the procedure, at least in my case.

I'm posting this from my upgraded KUbuntu while I check if my VirtualBox VMs are ok. Some notes that could be useful for other people doing that.

I answered "No" when I was asked if I preferred not to download the latest packages from the Internet. I did this assuming that it would save time. In this mode, the installer gets everything from the CD but will prompt you after the first reboot to update the remaining packages.

It took only 30 mins from the time I started the cdromupgrade to the time of the first reboot. After that I had a functional system but without nVidia drivers installed. I tried to enable them but the jockey application did nothing when I clicked on the "enable" button.

I did not wanted to wait for any prompts and ran directly the sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade commands. After another 30 minutes of downloads and installs I rebooted again. This time jockey worked properly and I was able to simply enable the nVidia drivers.

In all, an hour to update end to end.

First impressions: the beast boots faster, all my VirtualBox VMs are working, now I can play bzflag without disabling the desktop effects, the new theme colours are impressive, the task bar scales down the buttons for the applications creating both a nice effect and a very usable taskbar. Ah, and there is no longer garbage in freshly opened windows. All my settings, music, login photos, etc, seem to be in place. A nice icon popped after a while and offered me to install flash, MP3 and other codec support (I agreed)

All the above, and they are just the first feelings after half an hour or so. Overall, a very pleasing and trouble free experience so far. It seems that the KDE guys are delivering on its promises and creating an environment that is top of its class.

Tomorrow I'll check if Samba finally works ok and media playing is on par with the rest of the package on quality.

[brasslover]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

Is safer. There is at least some risk of your upgrade being stopped if your mirror of choice is saturated. And just after a new release this is much more likely to happen. I'm not sure at which point a crashed upgrade can be restarted. Probably an upgrade stopped during the download stage is not very difficult to fix. I prefer not to know that.

You can always perform the initial package download separately:

cd /etc/apt
sudo cp sources.list sources.list.hardy  #make backup of apt sources
sudo sed -i s/hardy/jaunty/ sources.list #change apt sources release version (replace 'hardy' and 'jaunty' with applicable versions)
cat sources.list                    #verify apt sources modification
sudo apt-get update                #update apt database
sudo apt-get -d dist-upgrade         # -d Download only - do NOT install or unpack archives

Now if you don't want to complete the upgrade yet you can also do this:

sudo cp sources.list sources.list.jaunty #save copy of new sources list
sudo mv sources.list.hardy sources.list #restore previous sources list
sudo apt-get update               #update apt database

I have done this on several upgrades. I've already downloaded all of the Jaunty packages on one of my machines, but I may not even upgrade as I'm still on the latest LTS (Hardy) and haven't decided to go for KDE4 yet.

[claydoh]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

It is very easy to upgrade from a cd, but it has to be the alternate disk
Loook here for details. There basically is an upgrade tool on the cd itself.

In the livecd the entire filesystem is basically a compressed image, while the alt disk has all the actual packages needed

[pansz]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

I've not tried the 9.04 upgrade yet, but my last 4 upgrades were done from the CD. From my point of view, there at least three reasons for wanting to upgrade from CD

I bet if you had tried the squid caching server or use some other caching facility, and if you know how convenient it can be, you will never ever want to use the CD again...

I setup a caching server, point all computer's proxy to it, upgrade one computer from 7.04 to 7.10 and to 8.04, it completes in 3 hours. ——then I upgrade the other 10+ old computers, all of them can upgrade within half an hour!

My typical installation has 6GB and the CD contains only 2GB out of my 6GB packages, using the CD is truly useless because the CD is much *slower* than the caching server and the caching server caches the other 4GB packages. (if you use CD upgrade you need to download the extra packages for every computer, consider if you need to download 4GB for 10+ computers...)

Anyway, you only need to setup your server once, you can do upgrade for any future versions.

It is faster NOT using the CD: you may argue that CD-R is cheap, but burning CD needs *time*, which isn't cheap at all. a caching server can serve 100+ computers upgrade *simultaneously* and you may need to burn lots of CDs for that case and still cannot install any faster than a caching server.

It is also safer NOT using the CD: there never is a kubuntu version (till now) which can perform flawlessly at the time CD creates. usually many bugs will be fixed by following updates, setup a caching server directly upgrade your system with all the updates and it generally has less bugs than the CD.

I maintain our caching server at my corporate and I know that almost all users who have problem installing kubuntu is using the CD. Using my caching server is far less prone to fail at installation or upgrade.

[barbolani]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

pansz is probably right, however, I don't have any servers at home

[flarson]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

If you have 3 computers to upgrade you have 3 candidates to act as the cache server. This has the added benefit that you can set one of you machines to download all updated packages in the night and in the morning all of your computers have the upgrades on your local network. You can also clean the installed packages from each of your machines and actually use about 1/3 the disc space. apt-cacher-ng is very good and easy.

[barbolani]

Re: is it possible to upgrade from CD?

Thanks for the tip, I'll check apt-cacher-ng as I've never heard of it before. Even if I have 3 machines at home, I usually don't leave them powered on by night, as they are quite noisy.