Upgrading
After spending yesterday upgrading WordPerfect, today was the monthly PMS Day [Patch MicroSoft – what did you think?] on two machines, and then I checked Linux and the new LTS [Long Term Support] version of Ubuntu was available on the Software Update page. I backed-up and pressed the ‘upgrade’ button.
After downloading well in excess of 800MB of compressed data that contained 1963 files I sat around a couple of hours as it went through the process.
There was only one problem – I should have removed some of the old versions of the Linux image from the boot partition to free up space.
There were a couple of errors on re-boot, but the only thing that doesn’t seem to want to work is a game that I use to distract myself when I hit a coding block [writer’s block for programmers].
Things went amazingly well given the potential for problems, and I didn’t have to do it by hand, which was a plus.
4 comments
This may be what finally drives me to buy one of System 76’s laptops, to spare myself the agony of that Ubuntu upgrade on the ancient desktop box I’m using (how ancient? don’t know, but it’s truly prehistoric). Life is short; eat dessert, well, not first, but at least before you die…
I eat desert while I’m cooking dinner and then when I’m cleaning up – the sugar gives me the energy 🙂
I would consider a used box from Amazon that was more current than what you have, although the System 76s are nice machines and you don’t have to set up the software. The used Dell I picked up for XP is a good box and it was under $200.
Other than the change in upgrading and getting a newer version of the game, it was a remarkably pain free change with no lost data, but I have a 1TB disk for it to play with.
One thing I haven’t run across online: can the new Ubuntu LTS version (14.04 if I remember right) run on a System 76 with some version of the GNOME shell? It looks like the answer is “yes,” but it’s hard to tell if it’s available with the bugs shaken out. I confess I am less than fond of the Unity shell… it’s kind of “busy” … and I switched to GNOME 3 shell quite a while back, a change which was good for my blood pressure. I notice that ubuntugnome.org lists an Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.1 LTS as having been released this month; I suppose if I were willing to be the guinea pig, I could persuade the System 76 people to deliver a laptop with that version preinstalled. Just how brave am I when I throw them a $K or so?
I freely admit I do not deal with long installs and similar annoyances as well as I did in my younger years, and diabetes isn’t helping matters. I’m afraid if I outlive the support cycle of 12.04 LTS on this old machine, I’ll find myself stranded with something unsatisfactory in my “golden” (heh) years. So I need to spend money on a new machine and OS now, not later. But I also really need a new used car, preferably cripple-equipped, and if I don’t do that now, I’ll end up spending money to maintain this 20-year-old Chevy yet again.
Well, 14.04 was released in April and the upgrade notice didn’t appear until this week, so I assume that is has been flogged rather vigorously. The Linux kernel was updated today, so things seem to be in hand. All of my programs work with the new version, so I haven’t noted any major changes, beyond it’s being more graphically oriented in the Unity version, but I can live with that.
Yes, it’s tough to make the choices when you don’t know how long your resources have to last.