Stuck in unsupported distro upgrade ... from 12.04 to 12.10 and stuck.

[bapoumba]

Sorry I missed the sharing /home between 2 linux installs (are these both Ubuntu ?). You already have been living on risky grounds
I personally have the /home in the root tree, with 2 separate storage areas that I do not format should I fresh install. All my stuff is in there. For a long time I used to have a separate /home and one /storage, but not any longer.

I'm not sure I understand the I could just comment the home partition out of fstab and then pull it back in after the damage ... part.

You wont be able to upgrade with a package manager without a /home as far as I understand it (if I am mistaken, I'd really like to know). If you fresh install to an existing partition, either your point at a pre-existing /home and say to not format it (and use it as /home) or you say nothing and this install will have a /home in the root partition.

Please save anything that is of value to you in any case.

[randomas]

I'm running a full backup of mu home partition as we speak ...
I was using a common home for twin installs one was regular work the other had 3d stuff I used to have to change a bios setting to get the nvidia card working and ubuntu would not, let's say, alternate gracefully.
Then came bumblebee that fixed (sort of) things.
What I mean by the fstab thing is comment the home mountpoint from fstab reboot recreate a home environment (logging in should be sufficient) and do the update, delete and uncomment fstab ... Should be able to upgrade without a home too though.

My fear is what an ubuntu distro upgrade entails, with debian (a long time ago admittedly) I would just change the sources update, upgrade and work my way through the conflicts, but there were no config scripts running during the upgrade process, I wonder if this is still the case with ubuntu, i.e. if all the scripts are contained within the dpkg package upgrade process or whether the upgrade manager does some crucial stuff behind my back as well.

[sudodus]

I don't know the details of the upgrade manager, but I know that the success rate is higher for fresh installs compared to upgrades between versions, talking about

do-release-upgrade

not

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

[bapoumba]

For any upgrade (regular or adventurous), you should deactivate any third party repo or ppa you are using. Only keep regular ubuntu repos, main, restricted, universe, multiverse, with updates and security, but no backports or proposed either. Then change your sources.list, update and dist-upgrade, probably several times in a row (the update/dist-upgrade cycle) as we used to do in the old days until everything has pulled through. Absolutely SGDG.

(with the old.release repos, I'm not sure the do-release-upgrade will work sudodus. Will it ?)

[sudodus]

do-release-upgrade might not work, I have not tested it with old.release repos. I agree, your manual method is more likely to work, bapoumba. Anyway, the preparation to get a clean and well updated system without ppas etc increases the success rate.

[bapoumba]

I'd even do it from one of the virtual terminals, no GUI, but that is just me

[randomas]

Oh ok I hadn't thought about proposed and backports, thanks.

do-release-upgrade won't work because it won't see 13.04 as a regular update ... I'm hoping it just changes the sources list and runs update upgrade and doesn't do any other odd stuff I don't know about ...

[randomas]

Ok, I'm a little surprised and confused now, I just noticed that 13.04 IS NOT deprecated... So why does update manager not see it as the next upgrade and try and push me to 13.10 (that doesn't work)?

[randomas]

Ok forget that, it is deprecated ... just hit an official page that didn't have it listed as such...

[bapoumba]

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases