JDPFu.com 2025

I had a need to upgrade from a 6.xx release of Ubuntu this week and decided to do that rather than perform a fresh install of the current distro. My server has 3 years of tweaks – I’d hate to have to recall what they are, much less attempt to reproduce them on a fresh install. Not gonna happen.

All the instructions online explain how to do this with a GUI. What do you do when the X/Server doesn’t come up? That happened on my test machine on 7.04 – well, that isn’t exactly true. X did come up, but nothing else did. No menu, no left or right click on the desktop. Nada. Networking was up – I’m glad that I bothered to get it working on the first install – this was just a test machine anyway.

So the shortcut for each upgrade 6.xx>7.04>7.10==>8.04 is:

1. sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
   1. edit edgy ==> feisty
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
4. sudo apt-get -f install
5. sudo dpkg —configure -a
6. sudo lsb_release -a

Ok, so if you lose your desktop, add in at the end and reboot.

1. sudo apt-cdrom add
2. sudo aptitude update
3. sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop
4. sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

Output should show a new release.

Simple?