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I always like having the latest versions of software, with the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on October 29th I wanted to perform an update on my home server to test the new features.  Additional information regarding Ubuntu Server can be found at www.ubunutu.com and a list of new features in version 9.10 can be located here.

As with any update you should always backup your important information and make sure that your existing software has all updates.  My information is stored on the server and an external hard drive so I am already backed up.  The next thing I needed to do is open a command prompt on my desktop that is connected to the server.  This can be done from a Linux Desktop, but my normal choice is to use Putty from my Vista Desktop, see my post on Creating a Home Server with Ubuntu Server if you need more information regarding this.

Once you have logged into the Server with Putty you need to get any software updates by entering:

sudo apt-get update

After you have the file list for any available updates you enter:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Now everything is up to date with the latest software, I only had one package to install, if you have updated recently don’t be surprised if you don’t have many updates if you have any at all.  Now you are ready to perform the upgrade to 9.10.

You can upgrade by using “apt-get dist-upgrade”, however Ubuntu recommends using “do-release upgrade” because it has the ability to handle system configuration changes sometimes needed between releases.

Go to the command prompt and enter:

sudo do-release-upgrade

I received a warning that it is not recommended to upgrade using ssh, but I have not had any problems using Putty to upgrade in the past so I chose y to continue.

This session appears to be running under ssh. It is not recommended

to perform a upgrade over ssh currently because in case of failure it

is harder to recover.

If you continue, a additional ssh daemon will be started at port

‘9004′.

Do you want to continue?

Continue [yN] y

At this point you will see the scrolling list of the system downloading files and dependencies in the repository list that are neededto perform the upgrade.

After a few minutes the following message appeared:

Do you want to start the upgrade?

13 packages are going to be removed. 187 new packages are going to be

installed. 588 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 513M. This download will take about

54 minutes with your connection.

Fetching and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the

download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.

Continue [yN]  Details [d]

At this point I entered y and let the system go to work. The downloading process ended up taking about one hour and 30 minutes. Once that was complete it began unpacking information, there were a few times that it stopped and asked for input so you should be near the system.

The first time it stopped, a window popped up asking if a list of services could be restarted since they were impacted by the install, Webmin, MySql, and Samba are a few that come to mind.  I hit enter to allow them to be stopped.
The second time it stopped asking about the MySQL configuration file being modified. The package has a new file, but you can choose to keep your existing version, which is the default. I entered N and pressed enter to keep the currently installed file and allow it to continue the install.
Similar messages related to the Samba and PHP configuration files stopped the process. Each time I selected to keep the existing configuration file.

About 20 minutes after the unpacking process began with a few stops for the inputs I mentioned again a prompt came up asking if I wanted to remove obsolete Packages, I had 41 packages to be removed. I entered Y and pressed Enter.
The system removed the obsolete packages for a few minutes and indicated that the System upgrade is complete and a restart is required. I entered y to continue with the restart. Once the system restarts, the Putty connection will be lost.
If you want to verify that you have successfully updated, reconnect with Putty after the system restarts and enter the command:

lsb_release –a

You should see the following:

Distributor ID: Ubuntu

Description:    Ubuntu 9.10

Release:        9.10

Codename:       karmic

Now you have Ubuntu Server 9.10 Karmic Koala installed, overall the upgrade was simple, although it did take a fair amount of time.  You should prepare for the hour to hour and a half of time to download and come back when you need to monitor and respond to questions during the installation.  I am excited to begin testing the new features, but I will leave that information for future posts.