Ubuntu 10.04 Is Reaching End-of-Life Next Month

[kaprikawn]

Great reasons to move to Arch or Tumbleweed - never having to deal with upgrade hell again.

Indeed. The Hardy -> Lucid inline upgrade is what made me uninstall Ubuntu on my home server and move to Arch.

The upgrade worked, but a few little niggles crept in. For example, whenever I opened the torrent client after the upgrade it would display an error message which I'd have to kill. This wasn't good on a machine that I wanted to leave on 24/7, every time something happened which required a reboot, I had to hook up a display and go in to sort this type of thing out.

In the end I'm glad for it. When I initially set it up I wasn't confident enough to have a headless server, now I wouldn't be without it. Any maintenance I have to do is done via SSH which mainly consist of the occasional yaourt -Syua, it's a brilliant Samba fileserver and great for torrenting (rtorrent + screen + cron > vuze).

[Luke_Wolf]

You do realize that you can just launch a live CD on your machine, rm -rf everything that isn't /home and then reinstall the system without losing any data just as if your /home would be on a separate partition, right?

I did this once or twice myself; it literally takes a few minutes and you don't have to deal with the inconvenience of having separate partitions.

And before you say that having /home on a separate partition has other uses - even if you want to use the same /home from multiple distros you still don't need a separate /home partition. (See man mount, specifically --bind; again, this also takes a minute or two and basically boils down to creating one directory and adding a single line to your /etc/fstab to set up.)

What exactly is inconvenient about using a separate partition compared to having to futz about with what are effectively hacks (rm -rf... seriously now?) to work around not having separate partitions. I can easily kill the system partition hundreds of times over without fear of losing my data, and move between versions without having to pull out a live cd to manually prepare the system before upgrading to a new version, or even a completely different distro. I do this with every OS I install because there's very significant benefits to being able to reinstall the OS if needed without touching the data or doing excessive futzing about with livecds.

[kiputnik]

Well... if Ubuntu at the time hadn't insisted on a single partition for the whole system other than /swap then the upgrade process would be pretty painless. Don't know how things stand with Ubuntu now, but since I learned about it I've always kept my / and /home separate allowing very easy upgrades or even complete distro changes if it suits my fancy.

You do realize that you can just launch a live CD on your machine, rm -rf everything that isn't /home and then reinstall the system without losing any data just as if your /home would be on a separate partition, right?

I did this once or twice myself; it literally takes a few minutes and you don't have to deal with the inconvenience of having separate partitions.

And before you say that having /home on a separate partition has other uses - even if you want to use the same /home from multiple distros you still don't need a separate /home partition. (See man mount, specifically --bind; again, this also takes a minute or two and basically boils down to creating one directory and adding a single line to your /etc/fstab to set up.)

[andyprough]

There are bound to be a few people out there, but hopefully not here, that will whine and carrry on about why they can't upgrade to 12.04 LTS.

The upgrade process is too [fill in the blank].

The upgrade process broke [fill in the blank].

I don't have time to upgrade because of [fill in the blank].

The new version doesn't support [fill in the blank].

This isn't going to be pretty.

Great reasons to move to Arch or Tumbleweed - never having to deal with upgrade hell again.

[Luke]

Systems far from stock should probably use a rolling release model

Upgrading of Ubuntu / Debian systems works quite well for a while now. One could get into problems if system drifted much from stock, but even then it does not represent a true issue for people with basic Linux/Unix knowledge. Sometimes it suffice to do ppa-purge.
Where things get more complicated is for system administrators, or software developers who then need to be familiar with whole environment (everything what regards them.), all changes in new versions of software etc. Just doing a release upgrade will sometimes break things (Like web applications - Apache configuration changed a bit), and one needs to do some homework in order to find out what/which new options are present, what became deprecated etc.
My favorite distro here is Gentoo, maintenance is very simple, practical, and reliable. One needs to install only once, and never again to reinstall. This works well, especially with stable branche, and even unstable is quite stable, no matter what people told you about Gentoo (It is not a bleeding edge distro, it used to be 10 years ago). ...but it has its own quirks, like everything else (It has its strength, its weaknesses, and IMO is not appropriate system for all situations.).
I also like Ubuntu and atm it is my main system (Although at work I have to maintain .Net application in the last time, and they prefer Win and MS as platform for development.).

My systems are so far from any stock distro that I never attempt an in-place update on a box that has gone unmaintained having originally been one of my systems. Instead such a box always gets a fresh image of the current rolling system. Between the PPA's and the stuff I build myself it would be quite a mess otherwise. The "update" process on the master systems is always a switch of repos in /etc/apt/sources.list as soon as a new alpha comes on line, and moving the PPA versions up as the PPA's themselves catch up. If I were to start from total scratch now ubuntu would not be the way to go, probably Gentoo because it would give better support for building so much locally.

[reCAPTCHA]

Upgrading of Ubuntu / Debian systems works quite well for a while now. One could get into problems if system drifted much from stock, but even then it does not represent a true issue for people with basic Linux/Unix knowledge. Sometimes it suffice to do ppa-purge.
Where things get more complicated is for system administrators, or software developers who then need to be familiar with whole environment (everything what regards them.), all changes in new versions of software etc. Just doing a release upgrade will sometimes break things (Like web applications - Apache configuration changed a bit), and one needs to do some homework in order to find out what/which new options are present, what became deprecated etc.
My favorite distro here is Gentoo, maintenance is very simple, practical, and reliable. One needs to install only once, and never again to reinstall. This works well, especially with stable branche, and even unstable is quite stable, no matter what people told you about Gentoo (It is not a bleeding edge distro, it used to be 10 years ago). ...but it has its own quirks, like everything else (It has its strength, its weaknesses, and IMO is not appropriate system for all situations.).
I also like Ubuntu and atm it is my main system (Although at work I have to maintain .Net application in the last time, and they prefer Win and MS as platform for development.).

[Luke]

Best "upgrade path" might be clean install of Ubuntu MATE edition

There are bound to be a few people out there, but hopefully not here, that will whine and carrry on about why they can't upgrade to 12.04 LTS.

The upgrade process is too [fill in the blank].

The upgrade process broke [fill in the blank].

I don't have time to upgrade because of [fill in the blank].

The new version doesn't support [fill in the blank].

This isn't going to be pretty.

You are not kidding: an update to 12.04 Ubuntu would have to switch the desktop to Unity and remove GNOME 2, or else leave old code no longer in repo installed. If you want to keep the desktop you have, my advice is to mount your filesystem from any external OS drive or live disk, shitcan everything in it but /home, move the user directory from /home to the root of that partition, unmount and fsck the partition, then shrink it by about 10BG. Make a new partition in the resulting free space and install Ubuntu 14.10 MATE edition (which will have long term support I hear) in that space. Boot it and clean up the mess made by your desktop settings being in gconf and current MATE using gsettings, this should simply be a matter of configuring the desktop from it's defaults. I could probably to this in a couple hours.

[Nille]

The 10.04 Desktop is still EOL since 2 Years.

[AJenbo]

Well... if Ubuntu at the time hadn't insisted on a single partition for the whole system other than /swap then the upgrade process would be pretty painless. Don't know how things stand with Ubuntu now, but since I learned about it I've always kept my / and /home separate allowing very easy upgrades or even complete distro changes if it suits my fancy.

Nothing has changed in that regard, and you have always been able to set up partitions manually. What you are talking about also isn't upgrade but a fresh install with reusing the home partition

[Luke_Wolf]

There are bound to be a few people out there, but hopefully not here, that will whine and carrry on about why they can't upgrade to 12.04 LTS.

The upgrade process is too [fill in the blank].

The upgrade process broke [fill in the blank].

I don't have time to upgrade because of [fill in the blank].

The new version doesn't support [fill in the blank].

This isn't going to be pretty.

Well... if Ubuntu at the time hadn't insisted on a single partition for the whole system other than /swap then the upgrade process would be pretty painless. Don't know how things stand with Ubuntu now, but since I learned about it I've always kept my / and /home separate allowing very easy upgrades or even complete distro changes if it suits my fancy.