Quickguide: Installing/upgrading advice to Gutsy

[Artificial Intelligence]

So you want to install/upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu?

Here's some good advice before proceeding;



1) Wait a month before installing the latest version of X,Y,Z distro after its release.
That would give the devs some time to iron out some critical bugs that might appear after the release.

2) Always backup you stuff.
No matter what, backup, backup, backup. Accidents can happen, better to be safe than sorry.

3) Go for Clean install instead of upgrade.
No matter which OS or distro, an upgrade may be a hazardous process, especially if you have non-official libs/apps installed or if you have heavy modified your OS.
If you kept to the official sources there should be no problem upgrading.

4) Download the torrent .iso of Gutsy.
The .iso file will less likely be corrupted than FTP/HTTP download.
Also it will spare the Ubuntu servers a great deal.
Read more... - Download Torrent

5) Make sure the CD/DVD-drive is clean, also check the CD/DVD for damaging and dirt.
yes, this seems so obvious, but I helped a lot of people where these simple step did the difference.
Note: the quality of the CD/DVD also have an impact on success rate.

6) Check the checksum of the downloaded .iso.
To avoid failure and corrupt Ubuntu CD.
Read more...

7) Burn the CD/DVD image at 4x speed and verify it afterwards.
By burning it at low speed you'll avoid error on the Ubuntu CD,
Verifying it to make sure it's identically with the downloaded .iso.
Use CD/DVD-r, not -rw as it may give installation errors.
Read more...

8 ) When inserting the Linux CD go to the verify/check CD option, and let it check itself.
Yes even it pass the other tests it still can happen there's error on the burned CD/DVD.

9) Have seperated partitions.
A good idea is to have / (root), /home and /boot
Read more...



=========================
Troubleshooting

a) If it continously fail regarding borked CD, mismath checksum, download the .iso from another mirror.
I have been there where one of the mirrors had a bad .iso.

b) If check and verify is okay and it still fail to install/load go for the alternate CD instead - which have text installer.
It's much more stabil and not difficult if you read and follow the text installer guide.
Computers with low memory should also use the alternate CD, see release notes.

c) Check your memory for bad sections
Yes, your hardware may have failure - insert the Ubuntu CD and run the memory check.

d) ATI cards - Nothing new here, always been a struggle regardless which Linux distro.
This will change soon (hopefully) as the driver goes Open Source.

e) Intel cards - clumbsyness and/or slow Desktop respond.
install : libgl1-mesa-dri

f) Slow bootup?
This might be the problem + solution - this thread.

Release notes - Known bugs & workaround <= Click me.

NOTE: This is advice thread, if you have problem please make a new thread or use our excellent search engine.

[ginestre]

I'd also like to ask for clarification of something that I'm unsure of: what is likely, possible or certain to happen to a) installed applications and b) data files when I upgrade via a clean install?

[Dr Small]

Excellent information. We have been needing something like this.
But I will add a few key points to it:

Originally Posted by Artificial Intelligence 4) Download the torrent .iso og Gutsy. The .iso file will less likely be corrupted than FTP/HTTP download. Also it will spare the Ubuntu servers a great deal.

The Gutsy torrents can be downloaded from here:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/

Originally Posted by Artificial Intelligence 6) Check the checksum of the downloaded .iso. To avoid failure and corrupt Ubuntu CD.

The MD5 Checksums can be found here:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/MD5SUMS

And to check a checksum, you run:

md5sum ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso

and it should be the same checksum as the one listed on the website.


Dr Small

[Artificial Intelligence]

No problem, that's why I kept this sticky open, so people can contribute to it.

[overlord.gaurav]

Hope this reduces a few up-coming threads.

[Taters]

Help... I probably should've waited a couple of weeks to install Gutsy, but I did it this morning. Now, when I boot up, I get a kernel panic message. Can I downgrade to Feisty for a bit? If I can, how?

Please help.

[Artificial Intelligence]

Please, post in a new thread. This is an advice thread. Thanks.

[intense.ego]

Originally Posted by ginestre I'd also like to ask for clarification of something that I'm unsure of: what is likely, possible or certain to happen to a) installed applications and b) data files when I upgrade via a clean install?

I'd like to know the same thing. As much as I'd like to upgrade, the thought of installing all my apps and supplementary packages is daunting.

[dptxp]

Is there any specific reason why I see a lot of advice on burning CDs at very low speeds,
as low as 4X ? Very low speeds do not essentially generate better CDs. Yes, very high speeds
can result in poor burns.

I have been burning iso images to CD, at least 50 to 100 so far with speed set at 'AUTO' or 'MAX" in Infrarecorder in Windows XP and K3B in Ubuntu. CDs burn at about 20X speed and I have not had any problem with a single one yet. And my CD writer is pretty old now.

Bad burning can be due to dirty/defective CD drives or bad media. But I guess that the main reasons
are either corrupt iso files (when torrents are not used), or the 'burn image' command is not used.

[Lord_Dicranius]

Originally Posted by Dr Small The MD5 Checksums can be found here: http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/MD5SUMS And to check a checksum, you run: md5sum ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso and it should be the same checksum as the one listed on the website. Dr Small

Here's the Ubuntu Wiki page for verifying the integrity of the downloads using the MD5 checksums: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM. Includes a link to a page with ALL of the MD5 checksums