Hacker News Reader

question: how does the ubuntu upgrade process work? do you reinstall everything from scratch? or can you just apt-get your way to a new release?

View on HN

You don't do a full reinstall unless you want to. Just run 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' in a terminal. (not 'apt-get update' nor 'apt-get upgrade')

Or start the Ubuntu Update Manager (System -> Admin -> Update Manager), which will display an option to dist-upgrade when one is available.

dist-upgrade doesn't upgrade the distribution: The difference between dist and normal upgrade is that normal upgrade will not install new packages if required, it will only update existing packages.

You have to use some other commands to get an actual Ubuntu version upgrade (I don't know them, but you seem to have the GUI version down.)

Ah you're right, thanks. In fact dist-upgrade should be avoided since it can apparently break dependencies.

After a little digging, the command line to upgrade to the newest Ubuntu version is:

%> sudo apt-get update

%> sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

%> sudo do-release-upgrade

apt-get alone doesn't do the necessary bootstrapping. The ubuntu upgrade manager should have a special upgrade option that appears, which does a bit more than a plain apt-get and does the trick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com