Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

[mhumm2]

I began the upgrade using Adept and after downloading all the Jaunty files, I got this error:

There was an error commiting changes. Possibly there was a problem downloading some packages or the commit would break packages.

How do I fix this situation? Thanks in advance!

[doctordruidphd]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

Try running the update from the konsole command line. It may give you more specific error messages.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

[mhumm2]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

Okay from a terminal this is the error that displayed with the download completed:

Fetched 810MB in 1h30min57s (148kB/s)
E: Couldn't configure pre-depend cups for cups-pdf, probably a dependency cycle.

apt-get update didn't show any problem with cups. Should I just delete cups and cups-pdf then reinstall after I upgrade the distribution to 9.04?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

I have a feeling that this error message (There was an error commiting changes. etc.) is a fixed part of Adept now. I've been getting it with every program that I install on my system but thought it was because I had fiddeled with this box for over three years without a clean install. Now I have been installing 8.04 on several other machines, and the message still comes up.

[kevinc]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

Adept is not being continued and KPackageKit the replacement for it in Jaunty has serious problems.

For an upgrade from 8.04 to 9.04 I would suggest serious consideration of a fresh install. Going from KDE 3 to 4 is a big step and lots of packages have changed. Doing a clean install of Jaunty allows you to use your old /home if it is on its own partition.

[mhumm2]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

Okay, I'm officially intimidated now. I can and have installed Kubuntu from CD; not a problem. I think I understand the intent of maintaining a home directory on a separate directory. I have a separate data hard drive that I could easily use. Questions first:

- What good is it to use the same home directory from install to install when application packages are not installed in the home directory? Apps are in the /usr/bin or /usr/share/bin directories I think.

- To create a copy of my home directory on my "data" drive, would the command be something close to the following?

#from within my home directory:
mark@Mark-AMD:~$ cp -vr * /media/data/homebackup-dir
# -v for verbose
# -r for recursive (all subdirectories)

- Would this also copy all the hidden files in the directories beginning with an asterisk ?

- How would I point the new install to use the backup home directory on my data disk?

Thanks to everyone for helping me with this.

[barbolani]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

You really piqued my curiosity on this one, I've never checked if hidden folders where processed by cp.

As it turns out, they aren't, but there is a way to make the * include hidden folders, documented at http://www.labtestproject.com/linuxc...ing_cp_command Warning: I've not tried it.

[kevinc]

Re: Upgrade Challenges 8.04 Intrepid to 9.04 Jaunty

Questions first:

- What good is it to use the same home directory from install to install when application packages are not installed in the home directory? Apps are in the /usr/bin or /usr/share/bin directories I think.

- To create a copy of my home directory on my "data" drive, would the command be something close to the following?

#from within my home directory:
mark@Mark-AMD:~$ cp -vr * /media/data/homebackup-dir
# -v for verbose
# -r for recursive (all subdirectories)

- Would this also copy all the hidden files in the directories beginning with an asterisk ?

- How would I point the new install to use the backup home directory on my data disk?

Thanks to everyone for helping me with this.

The reason /home or data is kept is not because of the applications which are in /usr but because of your data, whatever that may be which you keep in /home/your-user-name. For me, that includes some photos, all of my mail - which is about 600MB - things that I download from the internet such as howto's and some information from the Linux Documentation Project and even .iso files from the next system that I be testing. As my /home partition is encrypted I also have other things like usernames and passwords stored there.

But as the applications will be different and they are usually a subdirectory of /, it is good to overwrite the old / with a new one and loose all of the old apps and get the new ones.

When you do a fresh install, you select a partition for / and swap as minimal. A separate partition for /home is a good idea as you only have to specify a mount point and not format it, then your personal music, videos or other data will be preserved. You are also given the choice of copying one partition to another during the installation, such as an old /home to a new /home.

You probably back up your data and there are many ways and good howto's explaining that. Most of them also explain howto restore from backup. As many say, before you begin, backup.