Question about distro upgrades.

[mystika1]

Hi,
I have been curious about this and decided to ask..... When you do a distro upgrade do you have to reinstall all of your repos, packages and drivers? I figure the drivers will need to be reinstalled but what of the rest?

Thanks,

Penny

[claydoh]

Re: Question about distro upgrades.

during an upgrade, any repositories added (such as ppa's) are actually disabled so that only the main official repositories are used fro the process. You may have to edit and re-enable them afterward, depending on the repo's contents - some may no longer be useful in a new version (such as the kubuntu updates and backports ppa), while others may be useful/needed - medibuntu is one example.

You should not have to reinstall any drivers if they were installed via a package manager from the standard repos, or via the Additional Drivers install tools (jockey-kde).
This usually works fine, but probably the biggest place for upgrade problems are when the non-free, proprietary Nvidia or fglrx drivers are used, often more due to compatibility/configuration bugs rather than the actual upgrade of the drivers.

As for software, everything you have installed that is actually available in the standard repositories will be upgraded as well. That is normally just about everything Any ppa that has software not normally available in Kubuntu - such as stuff from medibuntu might have to be re-added afterwards. it shouldn't be too much, though.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Question about distro upgrades.

IMO distro upgrades are often troublesome. I view a version change as an opportunity to do a nice fresh re-install.

You can duplicate packages if you wish, dual boot until you're satisfied with the new version, and leave your old version around as an emergency backup!