Effortless Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 to Hardy 8.04 LTS upgrade

I noticed when I was installing Jaunty Jackalope that Gutsy went out of support on 19 Apr 2009. Gutsy has been the uber-reliable workhorse powering wakatara so figured it was time to upgrade to Heron LTS.

Pleasant surprise is that I hadn’t noticed there is now a release upgrade tool available for moving between full releases (which is one of the reasons apt-get has always been the bomb) Unfortunately, while I’ve been doing apt-get update and upgrades pretty regularly, I’d never added it to the server and with the Gutsy repos now unavailable it seemed I couldn’t take advantage of it.

Luckily, someone pointed me to the fact the iso image for Gutsy was still available at :

http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/release/

For me, I was missing the packages python-apt python-central and update-manager-core

I located those on the image, scp’ed them and then dpkg installed them on my Gutsy (after taking a snapshot backup).

After that, I just


sudo do-release-upgrade


and about a half hour later, with all the new packages downloaded, it installed, configured and rebooted waka1 to bring up the machine under Hardy (and I’d like to point out that’s the first reboot it has required since I brought up that machine over a year ago).

Have I mentioned I am totally lurving Ubuntu ?

Have checked everything out and all services and customizations seem to be running as they’re supposed to. Very, very cool. I am seriously very impressed. As always, backup before upgrading and YMMV, but I’m doubting it.