Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy) via Command Line

With the LTS (long term support) release of Ubuntu Hardy, I decided it was a good time to update one of my ancient PCs which had been running v5.10 (breezy) for the past few years.

As it’s a fairly low spec PC (Toshiba Tecra 8000, Celeron, 64MB RAM) I only have command line running so, to do the update I simply performed the following process to update to v8.04 (hardy). Of course I backed up first – as should you… As with all HOWTO guides, this process worked for me, read the guide in it’s entirety before proceeding, backup your machine, and may your Linux-fu be strong – good luck.

From the command line:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

This opens up the text editor vi (also know as Virtually Impossible by a former lecturer I had) and loads the sources file which tells the package manager where to find the packages installed. Once vi has loaded (read up on how to drive the editor first), replace all instances of ‘breezy’ (or the version you are upgrading from) with ‘dapper’ (or the version you wish to upgrade to). It is recommended to upgrade in steps, so this means repeating this whole process, replacing breezy with dapper, dapper with feisty, feisty with gusty, and finally, gusty with hardy.

For me this also meant I needed to uncomment some of the lines starting with deb, by deleting the # at the start of the line. Once finished, hit the key, and type ‘:wq’ (without quotes) to write the file and quit out of vi.

Update the package list by typing:

sudo apt-get update

and upgrade the distribution by typing:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

To check the process worked, type:

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo dpkg –configure -a

You will now need to reboot:

sudo reboot

Once rebooted, login and test the upgrade lists the version you were upgrading to:

sudo lsb_release -a

There – you should be done!

Hat tip to the very good guide at debian admin.