Should I upgrade from Daper to Feisty Fawn?

[Liam]

I am currently running KDE 3.5.2 on Dapper and wish to know if I should upgrade to Feisty Fawn or even Edgy.

I am using the machine as a desktop machine and I also have it networked to a Microsoft XP machine.

I primarily use it for Internet connection and running open office applications.

If the upgrade is recommended what is the easiest way to do this?

[PDR60]

Re: Should I upgrade from Daper to Feisty Fawn?

This may not be the answer that you're looking for but if everything is working good and you are using at described, I would leave it be. Some of the features of feisty are causing some problems. As long as you're getting security updates for Dapper you should be good to go. Its the LTS release and will be supported for some time....

Just my 2 cents.

I got tired of the reload/update every six months and have one dapper box and my main machine (my laptop) which is running Debian testing. It will never need a reload as I just keep moving to the next testing release. That's one of the main advantages of Debian.

[askrieger]

Re: Should I upgrade from Daper to Feisty Fawn?

My suggestion depends on how much tweaking you have done on your Dapper installation. If you have made only a few tweaks and have written them all down (I never do, and I always forget something), then the easiest thing to do would be to install Feisty from scratch after saving your /home directory tree, and then repeat your system modifications. If you don't want to go through the whole thing again, I would advise a two step procedure. Upgrade to Edgy and then upgrade to Feisty. This is the procedure recommended by the developers and I agree with them. If you're bold, you might want to try this How-to.

Is Feisty worth it? Opinions differ. If you have an AMD-64 system, or if you use wireless networking, or if have had hardware problems with Dapper, then do it. On the other hand, if you're happy with your Dapper system, why bother?

[Liam]

Re: Should I upgrade from Daper to Feisty Fawn?

Thanks. Given your advice I think I will stick with Dapper.

[pansz]

Re: Should I upgrade from Daper to Feisty Fawn?


For me I think update to Feisty is highly recommended. I've got two reasons.

1. almost all packages in dapper do not get upgraded at all, for example, vim in dapper is still 6.4 while 7.0 is out for more than a year, cmake is still 2.2 while the KDE requires cmake 2.4 to compile. ——You may have lots of packages to update and it may be a pain to know what packages need to be upgraded and find them manually. (if dapper does not provide package for vim 7, all I have to do is to go vim official site and download the source and compile myself, if I had 100+ such kind of softwares to upgrade, that will be huge work.)

I like the idea of Long-time-support, but Dapper is not a good LTS version since it does not upgrade software packages to a reasonably new version.


2. ubuntu is a distribution that, upgrade cannot be skipped. so if you are in 6.06 and you don't upgrade to 6.10, 7.04 7.10... Okay then suppose one day you want to upgrade to 9.04, then all you should do is to: upgrade to 6.10, then upgrade to 7.04, then upgrade to 7.10, then upgrade to 8.04, then upgrade to 8.10, then upgrade to 9.04. You may need more than a week to complete those tasks and it would be much painful than to just keep with the newest distribution.
—— the fact is that: when 9.04 is out and you're trying to upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10 you will got no support about that, few people will know how to solve the problem when you upgrade 6.06 to your 6.10 at that time.



The conclusion: typical linux users will have a lot of customizations for system so in most cases they do NOT want to install from scratch. If you choose not to upgrade to 7.04 and not to upgrade to 8.04 you will eventually need to upgrade someday, say 9.04. Then you have to upgrade step-by-step and cannot skip any upgrade. Upgrade in ubuntu is painful, but it is still the best way of keep working things work as expected.

Personally I don't like to upgrade and I don't want to upgrade distributions at all. ——but if we must use Kubuntu, keep upgrade is the best way. ——Other distributions may have a much better scheme on this.

[Rog131]

Re: Should I upgrade from Daper to Feisty Fawn?

Don’t fix if it isn’t broken.

1. almost all packages in dapper do not get upgraded at all

Well - Dapper is getting official security upgrades. But there are unofficial updates:

New backport: vim 7.0-035 debs for Ubuntu Dapper
http://www.freshnet.org/wordpress/20...ubuntu-dapper/
-> http://www.freshnet.org/debian/dapper/vim7/

More:
Kubuntu-de.org
http://packages.kubuntu-de.org/en/

The Archive contains various Kubuntu packages for differnt versions.

and you can use forums and ask if anybody have .debs available:
KSquirrel for Ubuntu 7.04
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2785376

Hi.

I'm KSquirrel developer. KSquirrel is an image viewer for KDE implementing OpenGL. You can learn more at http://ksquirrel.sourceforge.net/ . Many KUbuntu users ask me for binary packages for Ubuntu 7.04. I'm Debian user and cann't make binary packages for KUbuntu users Could anybody please make that packages (with checkinstall I think) and send to me ? You can find installation instructions and source code here: http://ksquirrel.sourceforge.net/download.php .

Now KSquirrel has .debs for dapper and feisty.

2. ubuntu is a distribution that, upgrade cannot be skipped.

Well - i tested this

HOWTO : Dapper to Feisty a.k.a. What Happens If I ...
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=13511.0

It is doable BUT i'm still using dapper (support ends June 2009 - hmm - is this correct ?) and feisty (testbed).

Probably best way to skip version is to create a separate /home partition and install rest of system from scratch.

Another view to the newest version: Topic: How did Feisty pass beta?
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3082644.0

Again: Don’t fix if it isn’t broken.