- Site menu:
- Latest Discussions
- Latest Newswire
- Archives
- Submit Story
- Story HOWTO
- Syndicate
- E-mail Alerts
From Lucid To Precise: An Upgrade Diary
This upgrade is directly inspired from an article by Joey Sneddon over at OMG! Ubuntu. Joey upgrades a 10.04 installation to 12.04 and gets some really great results. The jump from Lucid to Precise is a significant one, so seeing his success, minus the loss of his wallpaper, is great news for those of us that are able to stick with this Jurassic release. I mean let’s face it, it just works. The fact that Lucid ‘just works’ is its greatest achievement. I remember when I was younger, a working computer was not such a big deal. My machines were routinely broken because I was trying this or that, or testing something just for the sake of it. That behavior has changed with age. My argument for using Ubuntu over other distributions is a simple, philosophical one; Do you need something to do or do you need to do something. |
|
|
Comments (9)
Then, one by one, in the days and weeks following the distribution's upgrade, edit each third party source checking for compliance.
Some third parties keep the release name or number in their source and create a newly named source after the upgrade. Some third party sources keep the same name, yet update the software. Others are not maintained and will never be updated with newer software. You sometimes just keep running the same old stuff.
It can take months for some third party maintainers to update after an upgrade, if ever.
Be patient.
Quoting:It can take months for some third party maintainers to update after an upgrade, if ever.Yet another reason to just DIY, especially if the software package has security concerns (e.g. firewall module, credentials management).
That's good advice. Third party sources can open up a security risk.
Getting source code from the project itself and doing the step source code install can be safer.
It isn't that difficult to type:
configure make sudo make install
Ack. No. Don't do that.
Make a package which can be installed via your normal packaging tools. That way you can remove it easily if the need arises and potentially share it with others.
I believe checkinstall has the capability to build Debian compatible packages via the make process. I've used it created Slackware packages before.
To be fair, you should notice in my article that none of the issues that arose were the result of software from those PPA channels. The issue was with Compiz. I later discovered issues with the latest Nvidia driver, Compiz and my 6100go chipset.
I resolved it be installing the Nvidia v173 driver. So, for the recordm everything is working fine.
- Dean Howell
1) Doing a full release upgrade in order to the version of a specific package (or packages) that I want, or 2) Getting them by "other" means
I put LMDE on my wife's workstation -- and it doesn't have that problem. It's a rolling release, and individual packages do get upgraded over time. Sounds like Bodhi does something equivalent.
@Jeff91 also makes an incredibly important point: the more third party sources you use the more difficult things become. This is where you can run into package conflicts and upgrade errors galore. I don't know if apt-get/aptitude/synaptic have anything like yum priorities so that conflicts can be avoided by ranking the importance of repositories. Slackware Apt (slapt-get/gslapt) does have a similar mechanism, though it isn't nearly as flexible as yum-priorities when handling a relatively large number of repos, as in more than 2 or 3.
One of my biggest complaints about both Red Hat and SLES/SLED, both enterprise operating systems used in business, is the relatively small size of their repositories and the large number of commonly used business packages that are not directly supported. This forces an unfortunate dependency on third party repositories. For example, Red Hat doesn't package any of the popular CMS (content management systems) so I end up having to enable EPEL on most of the web servers I support. This obviously applies to the free Red Hat clones and Oracle Linux as well. This is where Debian and Ubuntu really should shine since they have huge repositories, yet here we have an example where a large number of third party repos still created a huge mess for an Ubuntu user. Unfortunate.
And yes - apt does support putting different "priorities" on repos.
~Jeff
Post a comment
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:Sign up and post (it is free) or Log in and post
That being said - this is one of the many issues with PPAs. It is the reason the Bodhi team and I work so hard to backport current software versions to our users - so they don't have to go through adding piles of potentially unsafe/messy PPAs to their systems.
~Jeff