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Darkmoon_UK
February 24th, 2009, 12:16 PM
Hello,
I ran a Edgy box for many months, as a general purpose server, and last night decided to upgrade distro to 8.10. Deciding to take the route through all the intervening versions for safety (ha ha) the first hurdle I encountered was the repositories being moved from archive to old-releases. So, with sources.list set to feisty on the old-releases server, I did:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
My first run of update reported some truncated BZip2 files, but subsequent runs didn't report this, so I forged ahead with the dist-upgrade. Cue 2 hours process of downloading and performing package replacements; which then stopped on a problem with scim-bridge. Restarting the box resulted in a completely dead machine with a black screen after the very initial boot. Great... I'm not going to moan too much as Edgy is obviously quite an old distribution and I'd left it a long time. But it does look as though something in the repositories was broken - and the GUI upgrade tool was certainly out of the question, as is well documented. Couldn't Ubuntu Team be more careful to preserve the upgrade path?
My main concern now, is to be able to reinstall to the latest version 8.10 while preserving the websites and other data that exist on the machine (basically the AMP configuration). Will a standard install-over-the-top take care of this? Otherwise, what particular locations should I back up and restore onto the fresh box?
Thank you very much for any help, I love Ubuntu but times like this can be trying for a wet-behind-the-ears Linux explorer like myself...

laithbsoul
February 24th, 2009, 12:21 PM
I'd say just install a fresh 8.10

Darkmoon_UK
February 24th, 2009, 12:27 PM
Agreed but your post doesn't address the main concern of retaining my websites - specifically, the Apache Config, mySQL databases and PHP settings. Will these survive a standard 8.10 install process? Sorry if this seems obvious to you but I can't afford to try it out only to be wrong...