I have a VM running ubuntu 11.04 that gets a lot of use but definitely needs upgrading, especially since 11.04 stopped getting proper updates for a good while.

I'm obviously better waiting for 14.04 LTS to arrive rather than going to 12.04.

But does anyone know the best way to do a fresh install (or upgrade) and be able to copy/retain all programs/packages, cronjobs etc etc.

I've read doing an "upgrade" via a LiveCD/USB being the safest way to go about this.

I'm sure I've only heard bad things about "do-release-upgrade", and the one time (at band camp) that I went down that route with ubuntu it fucked the system. Thankfully with it being a VM making a backup is easy.

I don't think upgrades work more than one version and even then the odds of failure are rather high. You could clone the VM for a test run. Otherwise note the stuff you want to replicate and do a clean install. Some features will have changed quite a bit since 11.4. I'm running 10.4 server ppc and it's still getting kernel, apache, php & security updates almost monthly. Ubuntu is pretty good at back ports. Maybe you don't really need to upgrade?

10.04 is an LTS build so is still getting support on the server side of things.

Official 11.04 support stopped a while back, I've had to add some extra repos to be able to install anything new.

I partly want a fresh install because there's something being causing it to crash too often lately. Probably wishful thinking to copy everything over. I shouldn't really stick all my own scripts/programs in /usr/bin :$

 

With Pacman on Arch you can get a list of all modified files and also all files not controlled by the package manager, so the former would cover altered config files and the latter would cover stuff you've added to /usr/bin. I have a cron job to write all that (plus a list of installed packages, which Apt can definitely do) to text files and then feed those into rsync to backup all modified configs and added files.

Which... essentially means I can get back to exactly where I was without the pain-in-the-arse-that-is-disk-imaging (which is far less of a pain in the arse with btrfs snapshots, but still).

So, yeah, reason I'm saying all this is maybe Apt can do all that too?

 

Pretty sure I can get a full list of packages installed from apt so that should be covered. And also feed that list back in on a clean install.

Could do with looking into if there's a similar thing for non-controlled files. I'm guessing I should have put my own stuff in /usr/local/bin to make it easier to find.

Need to remember to copy /var/www

Yeah I just stick my bash scripts and custom executables and stuff in ~/bin.

I think you'd definitely benefit from going rolling, not Arch necessarily* (though it is a joy to deal with). Debian testing might make sense since you could do an Apt package list and then use Apt in Debian to get where you were. Downside is no PPAs (afaik?). Or OpenSUSE on tumbleweed I guess.

(* I realise it's kind of an irritating step to take when what you have is basically working and you don't want to fuck with it, you just want it to keep working, but I do think you'd really like Arch. It's certainly more work to set up, though not as much as people seem to think, but once it's up it's so easy. You just don't get the breakages you get on other distros because everything is, at base, simple. Plus the AUR pisses all over PPAs </evangelism>)

I do need to give Arch or another rolling release distro a go at some point. Most likely on my laptop when I can be bothered tidying it up and either making a partition or ditching Win7.

For this VM it basically just sits there doing not a lot and just needs to tick along but is essential to a few things that I have running. It just needs a fresh install, an LTS release probably being the easiest option.

But yeah, I keep saying that I'll give Arch a go. Need to pick an evening and just do it.

I ran a rolling Debian release (Sidux) for a few years, but decided it wasn't worth the bother.

What's the bother? It's exactly like non-rolling except you don't have to do a format/reinstall ever.

Constant stream of updates, frequent breakage, finicky upgrade process. No real benefit (except learning lots about linux, for that it was good).

Been running a machine on Debian sid for about ... 5 years and literally never had anything break. Same for the machines I've had Arch on for up to about 3 years. As for constant updates... update it less? I just update the Debian machine when I can be arsed. Which tends to be every 6 months or so.

sidux/aptosid does/did custom kernels based on the latest (unlike vanilla debian sid) so on account of that they had to also put patches onto a bunch of other stuff and sometimes (/frequently) their repos got out of sync. You can read all about it here if you are so inclined.

It did put me off the whole rolling release idea, and now I just clean install fedora, ubuntu and opensuse every year or two depending on when support runs out, the hdd dies, or I want to see some new thing. I generally run updates monthly, mainly for the security fixes (but not excluding others).

Ahh right, yeah that could get annoying.

I do rather like Fedora and OpenSUSE. The latter has a rolling option :>

Yeah I noticed that. Does seem to be buzzword du jour.

S'cos it's better :Y

Timed releases made sense when stuff was distributed on CDs but now people use t'net they make less sense.

I still burn live cds (usually minimal xfce or even headless server), so I can test on my hw prior to install & for rescue.

No USB stick?

My pc isn't usb-bootable. On the plus side, it has an AGP slot!

Have you tried upping the agp voltage?

If that doesn't work, reseating the RAM is sure to fix any issues.