Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Oct 20, 2007

Ubuntu has come a long way since Warty Warthog. Ever since their first LTS release (Dapper Drake) it's been possible to upgrade fairly painlessly from one distribution to the next. If you're running a slice over at Slicehost you'll likely be able to get Gutsy by default, but until then follow these instructions for upgrading from Dapper to Feisty and then read on for the dead-simple instructions to go one step further to Gutsy Gibbon. These instructions are best used for servers.. there are other methods for Desktop upgrades.

The first thing we need to do is replace all the instances of feisty in your etc/apt/sources.list file with the word gutsy. Rather than doing that one at a time, let's just use sed:

sudo sed -e 's/\sfeisty/ gutsy/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list


Next, let's do an update:

sudo apt-get update

Chances are, if you followed the previous instructions, that you already have the update-manager-core, but just in case it's been updated since I wrote this, grab it again:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

And finally, let's start the upgrade:

sudo do-release-upgrade

Follow the on screen instructions carefully (remove the obsolete packages!) and reboot your system when prompted. When you get back into your new Gutsy server, do another round of updating and upgrading:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Reboot once more for good measure and then check out your results:

lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 7.10 Release: 7.10 Codename: gutsy