I recently tried to upgrade Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. I don't like upgrading operating systems, I had some bad experience upgrading Windows 98 to Windows XP. Still I was a bit surprised that Ubuntu confirmed my resentments.
After starting the upgrade program and watching it work for a while, I decided to prepare lunch. I returned some twenty minutes later (Carbonara is really quite quick to prepare), only to notice that the upgrade program must have halted just as I left the room. Actually a nice move, because it taught me to sit and stare at the screen during the upgrade process.
Anyway, what happened? Ubuntu wanted to tell me that some installation sources have been disabled. A message of such importance, that Ubuntu had to halt the upgrade process. Consider what would have happened if I decided to install additional packages while the upgrade is running. I might not have been able to find the packages I expected.
Now that I learned to sit and stare at the screen during the upgrade, what followed was not much of a surprise: "The following packages are not supported anymore. If you did not activate software supported by the community (universe), these packages will be marked for removal." I reckon myself to be a pretty smart guy, still I had to read the last sentence twice to figure out what was going on. I copied the names of the packages to a text file; I know I have activated universe but might not need the packages in Gutsy. Unfortunately there where no reasons given for dropping support.
If you thought that was it: guess again. "The upgrade needs at least 941MB on the root partition (/). Please free an additional 451MB." Now this is what I call a reason for halting the upgrade. Ubuntu even gave some advice on what can be done to free additional space. After heeding the suggestions only squeezed out a measly 50MB, I uninstalled NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, Visual Pradigm and what I had left from an experiment in XFCE. This brought me to a total of 1.6GB free space on the root partition.
Great, now I started over with the upgrade:
- After starting the upgrade program and watching it work for a while, ... . You know the story. This time I did not prepare lunch, though. Instead I waited for a dialog that I can close.
- Anyway, what happened? Ubuntu wanted to tell me that some installation .... You probably know that story too.
- Now that I learned to sit and stare at the screen during the upgrade, ... Sounds familiar? Right!
- If you thought that was it: guess again. "The upgrade needs at least ..." You think you know the story? Guess again.
"The upgrade needs at least 1537MB on the root partition (/). Please free an additional 235MB."
This is when I decided to rather write about my experiences, maybe give some people a cheap laugh. Only reason for upgrading to Gutsy was, I wanted to use Gimp 2.4. I thought an upgrade to Gutsy was easier than compiling Gimp from source. Well, maybe next time I blog about me trying to compile Gimp.
Pretty weak for a distribution that has usability written in every corner of the installation disc.
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