[Installation] Downloading and installing

[james32]

I am entirely new. I have Kubuntu 8.04.1 on my Dell 3520 laptop. how do I download and install updated releases like Kubuntu 20.04 ?

[Don B. Cilly]

Assuming you have 18.04... to download and install, you can download from https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/
To upgrade... you might want to read this (especially the last posts).

[james32]

I downloaded 19.04? into my Windows 10, then copied to USB stick. Only shows 2.4 MB. and has a tag "unconfirmed". What's going on?

[Don B. Cilly]

For one thing, I would get 20.04. Much better.
For another, how did you "copy" it to the stick? I can recommend balenaEtcher.

[oshunluvr]

First things first, Don is right - use Etcher to burn the ISO onto a thumb drive if you're doing that, and go right to 20.04.

But if you have an 18.04 install, you don't need to, you can just upgrade it. It rarely fails to upgrade and if it is a brand new install, you've nothing to lose even if it did. Open a terminal (Konsole) window and do these commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

The first command will update your package listings. The second will upgrade all your current packages to most recent. The third will upgrade 18.04 to 20.04.

Note that this will take quite some time. It will download and install more than 2000 packages.

Honestly, it would probably be faster to re-install using 20.04 from a thumb drive.

[james32]

Thanks for your help. I downloaded 19.04 and copied to thumb drive using Etcher as recommended. Then to my laptop which gave me a window to make a choice to install or run from drive. No amount of clicking would give any action at all.

My original post stated I loaded my laptop with 8.04.1. This was an ancient version of Kubuntu. It may be that is part of the problem.

[Snowhog]

Did you try tab to go from one to the other options, and then pressing Enter? It could be that for what ever reason, mouse gestures aren't being recognized, but almost certainly, keyboard will be.

[james32]

Thank you. I used an external mouse in my laptop. It was installed and does very well. Now i am on a mission of discovery, trying to find the equivalent of WI-FI.