[norrisg]

The network upgrade from UNR 9.04 to 9.10 requires more free space than is available on a 4GB SSD. This is no great surprise of course.

The download for UNR 9.10 is only for the live CD, which can run as a live CD (duh!) or do a full install, reformatting the partition containing 9.04. It can't do an upgrade.

There appears to be no "alternative CD" for UNR; the only "alternative CD" being the one which is used to upgrade the standard 9.10.

The same problem will affect anyone who has a larger SSD which is nearly full of course, but in the case of a 4GB SSD, you can't just move stuff off it temporarily to make room for the upgrade as it is already stripped to the bone.

Has anyone found a way to upgrade UNR 9.04 to 9.10 on a 4GB SSD?

[dreamcore]

In the case of going from 9.04 Jaunty to 9.10 Karmic, you want to do a clean format and install anyway.

Because in doing so, you'll get the full performance benefit of a new ext4 filesystem, plus the new grub2 bootloader.

[Carnifex]

One alternative is you can redirect where update-manager stores the deb files when it downloads them, say to your SD card or a USB drive. If you decide to go this route, keep in mind, the SD card or USB drive must be formatted as ext3 or ext4, fat or fat32 will cause errors because it does not support advanced security features. The drive should also have at least 1 GB of free space, maybe 2 just to be safe.

In my case, I am redirecting to my SD card, which is mounted by default to /media/disk and I want to redirect to a folder called deb, so I open terminal and make the folder.

sudo mkdir /media/disk/deb
sudo mkdir /media/disk/deb/partial

Next open apt.conf, the file will probably be empty.

sudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf

Insert the following line, then save and exit.

dir::cache::archives "/media/disk/deb/";

Now when you run "update-manager -d" to upgrade, it should download the files to the SD card. Once you are done, open apt.conf and remove the line you inserted and delete the deb folder.

[norrisg]

Originally Posted by dreamcore

In the case of going from 9.04 Jaunty to 9.10 Karmic, you want to do a clean format and install anyway.

Well, no I don't want to do a clean install, or I would not be trying to do an upgrade.

Originally Posted by Carnifex

One alternative is you can redirect where update-manager stores the deb files when it downloads them, say to your SD card or a USB drive. If you decide to go this route, keep in mind, the SD card or USB drive must be formatted as ext3 or ext4, fat or fat32 will cause errors because it does not support advanced security features. The drive should also have at least 1 GB of free space, maybe 2 just to be safe.

That's a good idea, and particularly helpful that you point out that it won't work on FAT/FAT32. My normal SD card is FAT32 so it can be shared with Windows systems. The answer is simply to use another card for this purpose. I'll give this a try later.

[norrisg]

The upgrade is complete, but it wasn't exactly a smooth process.

The initial problem was that gparted would not recognize the 2GB SD card I was using, so I had to use the parted from the command line.

The second problem was that downloading the necessary updates took so long (due to heavy activity on the servers) that the Mini went to sleep. When it came out from sleep, the update took a segfault. After restarting the upgrade (which restarted where it had left off) the whole machine hung.

Once rebooted and the upgrade restarted again, the updates completed. It wanted to delete a number of unsupported packages, which I let it do.

The next problem was that the newly update system complained that language support was incomplete, so I allowed it to "fix" that.

Other problems include colourless grey icons on launch panel, it complaining that my 4GB SSD is "operating outside design parameters" without giving a clue what the heck that means, and a nasty hang running an automatic fsck on a reboot. It also re-enabled tapping on the touchpad (and probably changed a few other settings I've not noticed yet).

The other big problem is that it reduced the free space on the SSD enormously. This included leaving behind the most recent 9.04 kernel, and reinstalling Mono which I had previously removed. After a manual cleanup, it's only using a few percent more disk space than 9.04.

There's really no noticable improvements. Sure, a number of things have newer versions now, but nothing I can point to, to make feel it was worth the effort.

My advice to anyone who doesn't really need or want the latest and greatest is to skip this upgrade (although there does seem to be a tendency to require every new version to be installed in order to upgrade, which effectively forces you into a six monthly upgrade cycle, which frankly, I find unacceptable.)

[Carnifex]

I have heard others having similar problems with the upgrade process, including the "operating outside design parameters" error message. At this point, I have to agree with dreamcore, your best bet is to do a clean install. Actually, there is nothing stopping you from staying with 9.04, it will continue to be updated for at least another 18 months. I know people who only use LTS releases, which means they only upgrade every 2 years.

[reflex]

Originally Posted by norrisg

Other problems include colourless grey icons on launch panel, it complaining that my 4GB SSD is "operating outside design parameters" without giving a clue what the heck that means, ...

I'm glad you mentioned this. I saw the same messages about my 4GB SSD. It seems like the 4GB SSD reports some SMART data that the new utility doesn't like, so you get a warning.

[norrisg]

Originally Posted by Carnifex

I have heard others having similar problems with the upgrade process, including the "operating outside design parameters" error message. At this point, I have to agree with dreamcore, your best bet is to do a clean install. Actually, there is nothing stopping you from staying with 9.04, it will continue to be updated for at least another 18 months. I know people who only use LTS releases, which means they only upgrade every 2 years.

I've yet to read any online review which says that a 9.10 upgrade is anything less than perfect. Additionally, 9.10 is being universally accepted as a must-have, best thing since sliced bread, upgrade. I think we've got a serious case of rose-coloured spectacles here. True, it does work, with a bit of effort, but it is nothing like as wonderful or easy as one would believe by reading all the reviews!

There's many reasons for not doing a clean install each time, and one reason is that *nix doesn't mix user and system data, or user and system programs, or worse yet programs and data, in the way that Windows piles everything together into one big horrible mess (especially the registry). It should be easy to upgrade a *nix operating system without a clean install: in that regard, I'd have to say UNR 9.04 to 9.10 is a big fat fail. If the server versions (of Ubuntu) have the same need for a clean install to work properly, then there's a long way to go before they can be regarded as viable.