Upgrading Ubuntu from One Major Version to Another? Simple!

Regular visitors to the site probably know by now that I’m a Linux user, and I’ve been using Gentoo as my preferred distribution for the past three years. But because Gentoo requires a fair amount of attention (even just for the install), when it comes to installing Linux on a mobile machine, there are few distros easier to get up and going like Ubuntu. This is far from being an unknown choice in the Linux world, but it’s for good reason… it’s stable, detects a plethora of hardware and runs super-fast.

The reason I particularly enjoy it on notebooks is because it detects almost everything, if not everything there is to detect, from Bluetooth to WiFi to the graphics card to the audio and whatever else. I also found out this past weekend just how easy it is to upgrade as well, from one major version to another, and it impressed me enough to actually post about it.

For whatever reason, Ubuntu 9.04 would not boot up properly on my HP dv2. Not wanting to waste time with trouble-shooting, I downloaded the 8.04 LTS version instead, and sure enough, it booted up no problem. But since I wanted to remain current, I obviously wanted to upgrade to 9.04 and hope for the best, so that’s what I did. The process is remarkably simple, and given we’re talking about a full OS upgrade here, it’s in all regards impressive.

Since I was using the LTS version (long-term support), it meant that I had to change which packages it could download (LTS versions are designed to remain that version for the life of the support), and once done, the updater within Ubuntu will pick up that a new major version is available. So, I updated first to 8.10 and then to 9.04 and the entire process was unbelievably simple. The best part is that anyone could get by with this method of updating… not only Linux users. We’re definitely on the right track here.

For some bizarre reason, my audio card stopped working after the upgrade, but I’ll deal with that another day. One thing after another, it seems!