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I have a Dell Power Edgge 2950 server running Ubuntu 8.04. Now I would like to upgrade it to to the latest version 13.10.

This server is hosting MySQL database and Apache server.

root@server:~# cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu 
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS"

I am new to Ubuntu world. I Would like to understand all challenges in upgrading and how to solve the issues them.

Braiam
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user222137
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2 Answers2

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There are a couple of things to note.

Firstly, you cannot go straight from 8.04 to 13.10. You can however jump releases if you are using LTS releases (8.04>10.04>12.04). This is going to take a bit of time, so make sure you're prepared for that. Also make sure you have backed up your important data in case anything goes wrong.

Secondly, you will need to modify your repositories (if you haven't already) to point to the old-releases. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change every (xx.)archive.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com

E.g. ://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/natty/main/source/Sources would be changed to ://old-releases.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/natty/main/source/Sources

Then run sudo apt-get update and make sure it works without errors. If it does, run sudo apt-get upgrade and then do-release-upgrade to upgrade to the next major version. You can then continue to use do-release-upgrade until you get your system to the version you want.

Note that do-release-upgrade requires update-manager-core to be installed, so you may need to install that before upgrading.

Once you have finished upgrading, you should change your repositories back to the current list if they haven't been automatically, or otherwise just remove the old-releases entries if they are still in there.

You can see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades for more information on upgrading releases that are past EOL (End Of Life).

Good luck.

Jet86
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I think this would be a very bad idea. We have a server that is on 10.04, and last year I wanted to update or version to keep up with what is current. I simply upgraded to 10.10. After the upgrade, I reboot the server. Gnome was wreaked, I couldn't even login via GUI screen. I had to Ctrl+Alt+F1 to login. I am not sure why our server took the upgrade so hard, but it did. Our MySQL database process wouldn't start up either.

I would recommend making an image of your server hard drive with some software, before you try upgrading. If you are not using RAID Clonezilla is a good choice.

nate
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