Upgrading my 14.04.1 Trusty's

[Snowhog]

Inplace upgrade using sudo do-release-upgrade -d. This is what I did on my 64-bit saucy to trusty. I did do partition backups (Clonezilla) before hand "just in case".

The upgrade went without a hitch. Reactivated my third-party repositories, and all were recognized except for kubuntu-ppa-beta.list (expected). Dist-upgrading now.

Had to reinstall conky. It got removed during the release-upgrade.

This might be the smoothest release-upgrade I've done. Nice.

Now do-release-upgrade-ing my 64-bit trusty (also after backing up both partitions). <<< UPDATE FOLLOWS

All that follows moved to Post-Installation.

[SteveRiley]

I'm not sure why the -d option is required. Utopic is no longer a development release. But, like you, I had to use the option. do-release-upgrade wouldn't work without it.

I had to do my usual preferred tidying up after. This includes switching to KDM and getting rid of LightDM, also saying bye-bye to Plymouth and the zillion fonts I'll never use, drivers for printers that I've never seen anyone use, and a few other minor things.

Interestingly, do-release-upgrade displayed awareness of my Btrfs file system and created a full snapshot of / before starting. Super neat-o! No requirement to take a backup if you're using Btrfs. After you finish the upgrade, you'll be able to see the snapshot thusly (snapshots are just subvolumes):

steve@t520:~$ [B]sudo btrfs subvolume show /[/B]
/
        Name:                   @
        uuid:                   9b0591e2-11ac-0149-9f2d-3512f68cdf9f
        Parent uuid:            -
        Creation time:          2014-05-10 12:46:10
        Object ID:              257
        Generation (Gen):       159070
        Gen at creation:        7
        Parent:                 5
        Top Level:              5
        Flags:                  -
        Snapshot(s):
                                @apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34

Deeming the upgrade a success, I didn't want to keep the snapshot around any longer. Trying to remove it took a bit of exploration. The obvious command didn't work:

steve@t520:~$ [B]sudo btrfs subvolume delete /@apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34[/b]
Delete subvolume '/@apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34'
ERROR: error accessing '/@apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34'

Well, that isn't too helpful! Eventually I figured out that I needed to mount the device containing / into another directory first. In my case, that's /dev/sda2:

steve@t520~: [B]sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt[/B]

Taking a look, we see:

steve@t520:~$ [B]ll /mnt[/B]
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  12 Oct 24 21:42 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 250 Oct 25 00:10 ../
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 250 Oct 25 00:10 @/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Oct 24 20:58 @home/
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root  30 Oct 24 20:58 @apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34/

Now I could delete the subvolume thusly:

steve@t520:~$ [b]sudo btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/@apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34[/b]
Delete subvolume '/mnt/@apt-snapshot-release-upgrade-utopic-2014-10-24_17:32:34'

Don't forget to unmount:

steve@t520~: [B]sudo umount /mnt[/B]

And we see that the snapshot is now gone:

steve@t520:~$ [B]sudo btrfs subvolume show /[/B]
/
        Name:                   @
        uuid:                   9b0591e2-11ac-0149-9f2d-3512f68cdf9f
        Parent uuid:            -
        Creation time:          2014-05-10 12:46:10
        Object ID:              257
        Generation (Gen):       159070
        Gen at creation:        7
        Parent:                 5
        Top Level:              5
        Flags:                  -
        Snapshot(s):

Eventually I stumbled across Launchpad bug 997909, a bug reported two and a half years ago about this problem. The package apt-btrfs-snapshot contains a commandline tool of the same name that creates a Btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem each time Apt performs package operations. This package was never installed on my system; apparently, do-release-upgrade must incorporate the same logic -- along with the same bug.

[lcorken]

My desktop rig upgraded just fine from 14.04. It is fairly generic AMD64 with wired network and EXT 4. All my stuff is on /data partition so didn't worry about loss of data.
I used instructions on a page linked from kubuntu.org.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ut...grades/Kubuntu

I strayed from my norm of fresh install on other partition for the first time in quite a while, even to the point of letting Muon do the upgrade. Looking at the details the only error I noticed was a failure to find some gtk icons or some such that I likely don't care about. Haven't noticed much difference. Amarok opened with the same play-list I last used but volume is low until I stop and restart a track. Minor volume glitch? KDE is now 4.14.1.

Ken.

[GreyGeek]

....
The package apt-btrfs-snapshot contains a commandline tool of the same name that creates a Btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem each time Apt performs package operations. This package was never installed on my system; apparently, do-release-upgrade must incorporate the same logic -- along with the same bug.

The apt-btrfs-snapshot package allows one to keep a series of snapshots and roll back to any particular snapshot. Unfortunately, when I tested it last year, it was generating and maintaining a total of 15 snapshots, which were eating up my 750GB HD rapidly. Uninstalling apt-btrfs-snapshot didn't remove the snapshots it created, which are stored in hidden directories that are not mounted or accessible from the command line btrfs tools unless you mount your HD device as you did.

Apt-btrfs-snapshot aside, btrfs is an awesome filesystem, and will be the heart of the systemd backup facility, if I understand it correctly.

[GreyGeek]

Why upgrade from a five year LTS to a short term intermediate release? Get newer drivers that aren't back-ported to Trusty?

[SteveRiley]

LTS doesn't mean higher quality. It just means longer support. And it isn't just about newer drivers. Many applications in the repository are newer for Utopic and won't be backported for Trusty.