With 8.10 now on my Ubuntu partition I'm hoping that the upgrade goes smoothly but just in case it doesn't I am going to back it up from my Gentoo partition. I have Ubuntu installed on my sda2 partition so a simple 'dd' will suffice for a quick backup. I have enough room on my data partition but if you don't you can always backup to a usb drive.
I've heard there are problems with the older ATI cards with the new system so I'm going to prepare for that as well. Apparently the ATI catalyst version 9.4 doesn't support the card built into my 1 1/2 year old laptop so I plan on removing the ATI drivers from Ubuntu first then try to install the 9.3 version, which is the last version to support many of older chipsets.
So here goes...
Step 1 Backup
The most important step, I would not want to try the upgrade without an easy way to get back to the now working system.
Using dd to backup went smoothly as expected.
If you only have Ubuntu on your system you will need to boot from a live cd to do the backup.
dd if=/dev/ubuntu/ of=/path/file.img
on my system it is
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/data/backups/ubuntu810.img
Backup any other config files you may want to save also. On my system I need to backup my grub boot file to preserve my multiboot settings..
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst.save
Step 2 Reboot machine into Ubuntu
Easy step, no problems there.
Step 3 Remove ATI restricted drivers and restart the X server
Go to Main menu then System then Administration then Hardware Drivers. Select ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver and click Deactivate on bottom button.
Then alt-ctlr-backspace to reboot the server or just logout and back in.
Step 4 Update existing 8.10 software
You can use update-manager to update, but I choose Synaptic
Open Synaptic. Again System - Administration - Synaptic
Click on the Reload Button on top. When it is finished click on Mark All Upgrades button then click the Apply button and wait.
I am rebooting again, just to be on the safe side.
Step 5 Update to new 9.04 version
Open update-manager.
System - Administration - update-manager
Click on upgrade button next to New distribution release '9.04' is available. Click upgrade on the release notes screen that comes up and let it run the distribution upgrade. The upgrade tool shows that I have 1,810 files to download so I think I will go do some garden work. It will take a while.
I'm still waiting so I am posting what I have for now. Will try to update again tomorrow.
When I got back to the computer I found out my internet connection went down which forced me to start the update-manager from the start. I started it again and the same thing happened. It turned out to be a bad connection in the phone box. Now that is fixed it should be fine but it put me behind a day.
If there are any config files you have modified update-manager will ask if you want to keep your old version. I answered yes to preserve my menu.lst file which is used by grub to boot. That means it will boot using the old version of the kernel unless I edit the menu.lst and change the settings.
Select save obsolete packages
Step 6 Reboot to new system
Let update-manager restart your computer.
Step 7
Manually install ATI catalyst version 9.3
(I haven't been able to get this to work yet.)
I don't think this will ever work due to the xorg server upgrade and kernel so I set it up to run the open source radeon driver. While they work ok, its not as fast as the ati fglrx driver and mythtv doesn't work. However dual screens work better and they were easier so set up than with the proprietary driver.
Step 8 Reboot test and tweak new system
Step 9 Backup the upgraded system.
dd if=/dev/ubuntu/ of=/path/file.img
on my system it is
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/data/backups/ubuntu904.img
The new upgrade is working well although there are still a few rough edges to straighten out on this laptop.
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