2007-10-18 saw the release of the latest Ubuntu & Kubuntu Linux, version 7.10, also known as Gutsy. Unfortunately a number of users are having difficulties with the upgrade.
Seems that either the "Version Upgrade" button doesn't show in your package manager…
Or if it does show then you cannot go much further. Adept users are often confronted with an error where you can start the "Upgrade Wizard" OK. A message comes up saying
"A new distribution version is available. Click next if you wish to upgrade."
So you click the "next" button. Then an error dialog appears…
"Error
Could not download the release announcement. Please check that your internet connection is active."
Unfortunately I got fed up with messing about so I took drastic action. But first I backed up my entire home drive to a NAS box (using mirrordir). In a terminal window I typed…
- sudo mirrordir -v –no-chmod –no-chown /home/garf/ /mnt/smb4k/nas-00/garf-bak/
(I used –no-chmod and –no-chown switches because my NAS boxes won't let me change permissions via SAMBA. Ignore these if you are backing up to a USB drive or similar)
Then I typed these commands in a terminal window…
- sudo sed -e 's/\sfeisty/ gutsy/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get upgrade
Note, this should be considered a last resort and it is not the generally recommended way. Basically it points your /etc/apt/sources.list at the gutsy repos. Then when you do the sudo apt-get upgrade it thinks you have lots of out of date packages, in my case 2GB worth, and tries to upgrade them all, package by package.
I ran into a few minor dependency issues, which generally I fixed by completely un-installing what ever app was causing the problem running "sudo apt-get upgrade" again and trying to reinstall the misbehaving app at the end of the upgrade. Some apps have known dependency issues that were not fixed in time for the Gutsy release. Gwenrename for example kept on conflicting with Gwenview…
I find Gwenview very useful but very seldom use Gwenrename because it is very poor compared to Krename. Therefore I shed no tears about dumping it. I now have a fully working gutsy, with no dependency issues at all. And to celebrate I just got my USB-DVB TV stick working with Kaffeine!