Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008 [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008

Posted Mar 25, 2008 23:19 UTC (Tue) by ssam (subscriber, #46587)
Parent article: Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008

The Ubuntu 8.04 can preserve the home folder when installing, so you can 'upgrade' in one
step. you will still need to reinstall all you applications. make sure you have a back up of
important data. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbiquityPreserveHome

(Log in to post comments)

Or... (veering off-topic)

Posted Mar 25, 2008 23:42 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Or, you could have /home on a separate file system. This even works well when changing distros. :-)

Or... (veering off-topic)

Posted Mar 26, 2008 2:29 UTC (Wed) by ArbitraryConstant (guest, #42725) [Link]

I have mine on a separate disk. Airgap FTW :)

Or... (veering off-topic)

Posted Mar 26, 2008 2:37 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Actually, I have /home on a separate disk, too. But, a separate file system on the same disk would work as well.

Good job to Ubuntu for making a distro upgrade/migration less painful.

Or... (veering off-topic)

Posted Mar 26, 2008 4:58 UTC (Wed) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]

Is anyone really still running 6.10?!

Or... (veering off-topic)

Posted Mar 26, 2008 6:29 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Good job to Ubuntu for making a distro upgrade/migration less painful.


Actually you can thank Debian for that little nugget. The majority of software in those
repositories for what people call 'Ubuntu' is really a snapshot of Debian Sid.  It's Debian's
'hardcore'-ness with things like adherence to package quality and rules is what makes apt-get
upgrade work. Nothing particularly magical with apt-get or deb format that allows for it..
it's all in those packages and the man-hours put into making them work. Upgrades from one
Debian version to another have been, in my experience, better then anything Ubuntu has done.
But only by a margin; Ubuntu itself is generally easier then any other OS I've used.

What the remarkable thing Ubuntu has done is made Debian itself less painful. :)

Or... (veering off-topic)

Posted Mar 26, 2008 7:52 UTC (Wed) by danielhedblom (subscriber, #47307) [Link]

And even more offtopic. I suspect some distros problems with package management is more of a
package building problem than the package format itself. 

I have been using /home on another disk for ages now. It saves time when changing distro or
trying out a new one.

Ubuntu 6.10 reaches end-of-life on April 26, 2008

Posted Mar 26, 2008 8:53 UTC (Wed) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

Ubuntu is Debian, and Debian is upgradeable through apt-get/aptitude (or in Ubuntu case,
update-manager which is built upon that). What special features are needed to preserve /home,
I just don't know. My /home is preserved without any additional questions since probably 2002.

Upgrading? Re-installing

Posted Mar 26, 2008 17:17 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Yes, it left me a bit alarmed actually at first when I saw it described.

But it appears that what they're talking about as an "upgrade" actually flushes everything on
the system, and this is a feature which changes that to optionally not destroy /home.

So it's not like an ordinary operating system upgrade at all, it seems like it would be more
useful for "sidegrades", throwing away the OS but keeping the data. I don't know if that means
Ubuntu doesn't provide a mechanism for routine "same OS, newer version" upgrades, or just some
users don't like the potential for build-up of "cruft" (e.g. after five years of Red Hat
upgrades I had some obsolete binaries in /usr/bin/ that were so old my kernel wouldn't run
them, but the package manager had never actually deleted them)

Personally I've been very happy with upgrades of Red Hat and Fedora on multiple systems over
the years. They haven't always worked smoothly, but they were definitely less painful than
re-installing everything.

upgrading & (re)installing

Posted Mar 26, 2008 19:08 UTC (Wed) by undefined (guest, #40876) [Link]

ok, to straighten out the confusion...

ubuntu only officially supports upgrading between consecutive versions.

to move from 6.10 to, the latest, 7.10 you have two options:
1. "upgrade" from 6.10 to 7.04 and then upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10
2. "install" 7.10 over 6.10 where /home will be preserved but /etc won't

ubuntu does not officially support "apt-get dist-upgrade" to upgrade to a later version
(whether the next incremental version or not). ubuntu only officially supports using update
manager (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading) to perform an upgrade.

i figure the reason is insufficient testing of upgrades. debian puts a lot of emphasis on
upgrading between stable releases, but that only happens every year or two (overlooking sarge
;-) and is only expected to be between consecutive stable releases. that's relatively easy as
compared to testing the upgrade process to the current ubuntu release from every currently
supported version (usually 3 versions supported concurrently with the last one being dropped
about the time a new one is released) and repeating this every 6 months.

the feature of the installer to install a new arbitrary version of ubuntu while preserving
/home (which on ubuntu by default is on the same partition as everything else) is appreciated.
ubuntu works well out-of-the-box for the average desktop user, so reinstalling ubuntu is
generally painless as there's little (re)configuring required. so instead of spending the
time & bandwidth upgrading twice to get from 6.10 to 7.10 (or three times if you hold out a
month or so for 8.04), you can just install the version you want over the top and it won't
trash your user-specific configuration & data.

i'm curious if ubuntu is going to support upgrading between LTS releases (6.06 to 8.04) or if
the upgrade process will remain unchanged (6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04, whew!). i
figure the main user of LTS releases are businesses/corporations, where it's currently
standard practice with windows to just refresh/reimage/reinstall the computer and manually
preserve/copy the user's data & config, so maybe ubuntu/canonical isn't going to put any
effort into insuring a smooth easy upgrade between LTS releases (though windows does ;-).

i have a desktop running 7.04 (the latest version available when i built it last summer) and
i'll probably install 8.04 from scratch to put everything on lvm and create a logical volume
for /home (if it's not already that way; can't remember). after that i'll "install" LTS
releases to avoid the pain of multiple upgrades and as ubuntu has required very little
tweaking after installation (and the user data & config should be safe on the separate logical
volume for /home).

upgrading & (re)installing

Posted Mar 27, 2008 4:10 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Just curious... Is /usr/local preserved in any of these upgrades/"sidegrades"? How about /opt? Thanks!

upgrading & (re)installing

Posted Mar 27, 2008 10:42 UTC (Thu) by jonasj (guest, #44344) [Link]

i'm curious if ubuntu is going to support upgrading between LTS releases (6.06 to 8.04) or if the upgrade process will remain unchanged (6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04, whew!

It will. Ubuntu supports upgrades from any release to the release immediately following it, as well as from any LTS release to the LTS release immediately following it. People running 6.06 will see an Upgrade button in their update manager when 8.04 is released, just like people running 7.10 will.