8.04 LTS -> 10.04 LTS Lessons Learned

[rsteinmetz70112]

I have now updated three machines out of 6. I have posted a number of my problems here and gotten a lot of help both directly and indirectly from the community. I thought a summary of the issues I've encountered and the solutions might be helpful to someone else.

First, the update process will not work if OpenOffice.org is installed. Possibly this has to do with starting with a server install and adding the desktop to Ubuntu later. I'm 0 for 3. Simply remove OpenOffice.org and reinstall after the update.

Second, and much more serious the automated update does not properly update when / is on an LVM volume on a RAID Array. It almost works and the tools to do it are in initramfs but the order of activation seems off. This happened on two very similar machines. I have two more to upgrade.

Apparently the LVM volume is accessed before the RAID array is assembled. My solution was to force the activation of the arrays and the volume group by putting a simple script in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top and updating initramfs.

Third, sometimes the upgrade doesn't place the reference to the initramfs in the /boot/grub/menu.list. Edit GRUB menu.lst file and add the initrd line and update GRUB. I found other references to this issue in the forums. This only happened on one of my LVM and RAID machines, making it seem somewhat random.

Finally and this may be my error with the original installation. eGroupware did not properly upgrade. The messages I got during the upgrade seemed contradictory. Some indicated that eGroupware would not be upgraded but the upgrade was attempted anyway leaving a badly broken installation. The ultimate solution was to remove eGroupware after the distribution upgrade then delete the eGroupware directory /usr/share/egroupware to remove any leftovers and finally reinstall and reconfigure the whole package. After a working eGroupware package was available eGroupware handled updating the installation including updating the database tables well, if somewhat tediously, through its check installation utility. That required several passes since resolving one issue would sometimes uncover other issues.

I hope this helps someone else.

[Hagar Delest]

Have you upgraded through soft install? I have tried it once but the result was not very good neither. There are many reports about that, better install from scratch. HD has to be correctly partitioned to avoid data loss of course.

[rsteinmetz70112]

I have seen those reports and I sort of disagree.

I upgraded through Update Manager and except for the issues I mentioned it went very well. I didn't repartition my drive, rebuild the arrays or recreate the volume groups. As far as I can tell I didn't lose any data.

The GRUB issues might be somewhat expected because my installation, although fairly common was not as common two years ago.

I was disappointed that it was not handled better and that I could not get better information in the forums. That is part of the reason for my post here. I hope one of the developers picks that up and finds the reason for the problems.

A scratch install probably would have been quicker and I probably would have had a cleaner set-up, eliminating all of the excess baggage I had collected over the years.