Upgrading Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 in a virtual machine

As you will know the next major long term release of Ubuntu is about to ship in 3 days time so I thought I would do a test upgrade to make sure all was working well and there were no real show stoppers. This is a controlled environment, so won't be exactly the same as a machine that has been in use for a while, but is none the less a good initial test. If it doesn't work here, then it is definitely not going to work on a machine that has been in use for a while.

So, I installed a 9.10 i386 desktop virtual machine , using Virtualbox 3.1.6 on an Ubuntu 9.10 host. See the pictures below. This has had the Virtualbox tools installed.



I then ran a complete update on the virtual machine to make sure the machine had the latest packages before starting the upgrade.

I then ran

update-manager -d

to start the upgrade process.





Once the process had completed, which took just over an hour with a very fast internet connection, I was able to selct to remove the now obsolete packages and complete the install.





I then re-installed the Virtualbox tools, as we now have a new kernel and the system was up and running without any issues and the Virtualbox tools were working as expected, see below.



So this does leave a really good feeling for all of my machine upgrades that will be taking place after the release of the final version on Thursday.

If you are new to operating system upgrades, then I can't recommend this process enough for making sure you are confident before doing it on your work machine.

Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 installs more quickly into virtualbox VM

After installing the alpha 1 version of the next release of Ubuntu, which did take a long time, the latest release , alpha 2 is as smooth as silk, and considerably quicker. The actual installation process is much the same as 9.10, and in fact most of the screens still show 9.10 as the version ;-)

After an initial quick look around the only major difference I can find is the introduction of the new video editing software - Pitivi - by default, but gimp is still present even though it has been rumoured that is was to replace it.

See below:




One nice feature, is that with this version the Virtualbox tools are auto-detected when you click to install them, and Ubuntu auto-installs them once you have given the correct password. This is a very neat touch and brings Ubuntu fully in-line with the sort of auto-magical installs that happens with Mac OSX and Windows.

The other noticeable new feature is speed, this virtual machine boots to the login prompt incredibly quickly, and as the development cycle continues I can only see this getting faster, it will be a feature. The standard use of Ext4 and the reduction in daemons started at initial boot is bound to impact this.