Upgrading to new LTS version - any pitfalls?

[paulunderwood]

Originally Posted by Rodrigo

The /home folder is currently in the same partition as the OS. It's not a straightforward matter of creating a new partition for /home and copying everything over, is it?

The installation media for Xubuntu should have the program gparted, which will allow you resize a partition, and create a new one and format it.

Then you need a sane /etc/fstab to reflect your new partition. So the first thing I would do before using gparted is to make sure no user processes are running and cd /, then umount /home and mv /home /home_orig. Then run gparted from the installation media and mount the new partition under /home (if gparted does that for you on request). Finally, boot, then cp -pr /home_orig/* /home/ and reboot. (I hope fstab will then be sane, otherwise it will need editing.)

This assumes you can log on as root and have enough disk space to do all these operations, otherwise you might consider using a USB HDD/SSD to act as an intermediate storage system.

This page might help

[Rodrigo]

Good news: I remembered that I'd put away a disk drive for an old laptop, containing Kubuntu 16.04. I'd used the drive last year when first exploring that OS, and would swap it occasionally with the original Vista HDD. What better way to test the process, especially since the drive includes the two critical programs (Master PDF Editor and Softmaker Office).

So I put the Kubuntu drive in the laptop, let it update, and soon it was offering the upgrade to 18.04. I allowed it to proceed.

Less than five hours later, I have a spanking new Kubuntu version on the laptop. Best of all, those two applications made it through unscathed!

The only casualties seem to be the desktop icons (Firefox, Textmaker, and Dolphin), which are now generic. Even the Vista desktop theme was unaffected.

All in all, a very promising test run.

[VictordeHolland]

My Dual_Xeon homebrewed machine with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is now reporting errors every time I reboot (I can cancel them and everything appears to function, but something is wrong under the hood). It probably happened after one of my last massive update/upgrades of packages (including trying gcc7.3), so I probably broke something.

I hope a distro upgrade to 18.04 LTS fixes it for me (I'm not counting on it, I'm downloading a new USB image as I type this). But who knows :)

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

My Dual_Xeon homebrewed machine with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is now reporting errors every time I reboot (I can cancel them and everything appears to function, but something is wrong under the hood).

What kind of errors?

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

I'm downloading a new USB image as I type this). But who knows :)

Always a good idea. I carry a bootable USB stick and a bootable CDR with me at all times. But, then, some have said I'm a bit paranoid and extreme (they're probably not incorrect)....

[VictordeHolland]

Originally Posted by chalsall

What kind of errors?

The volume boot has 0 bytes disk space remaining
which I found odd, since Ubuntu 16.04 was installed on a 3TB drive.
and LVM was complaining about something else (I forgot the exact message).

Anyway, I performed a clean install of 18.04 LTS with the USB stick. And now that I'm at it, I might just as well recompile the factoring programs that I was using on it (msieve, gmp-ecm, CADO-NFS, YAFU) so that I have the latest versions of them .

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

The volume boot has 0 bytes disk space remaining which I found odd, since Ubuntu 16.04 was installed on a 3TB drive.
and LVM was complaining about something else (I forgot the exact message).

Listen to the warnings! Seriously!!!

"/boot/" is different from "/". Often on a different partition. And sometimes important for sanity....

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

Anyway, I performed a clean install of 18.04 LTS with the USB stick.

You might want to come around and figure out why your /boot/ partition became full, before it happens again.

FWIW.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Listen to the warnings! Seriously!!!

"/boot/" is different from "/". Often on a different partition. And sometimes important for sanity....



You might want to come around and figure out why your /boot/ partition became full, before it happens again.

FWIW.

BTDT. The system on which I am typing has a 100M /boot partition. Too many kernels and, especially, compressed filesystems and it fills up quite rapidly. These days I'm in the habit of checking free space before building a kernel but several times in previous years /boot has filled --- with unfortunate consequences.

Another gotcha: /boot is often not mounted until required and then umounted afterwards. df /boot then tells you the amount of space on the root partition and not on the /boot partition.