My laptop is stuck at Xubuntu 13.10 because I don't like internet dist-upgrades. I've been personally burned in the past, and I know of others who have suffered from losing a connection in the middle of the upgrade. It's a bad idea.
Aside: From the years when I used Fedora I discovered that their upgrade method is much better. It gathers all the necessary files but stores them on your computer without installing them. Then, when you reboot, it proceeds to do the upgrade. There are no problems with net connections. In the past with Ubuntu (through 12.04) you could do the dist-upgrade from the Alternate CD/DVD or bootable USB. But since 12.10 Ubuntu no longer produces an Alternate ISO. Instead, you use the regular live ISO and a few screens into the Install option you are presented with the option to upgrade whatever the Install media found on your hard drive. But I just discovered something. If there is no net connection the Upgrade option in the regular live ISO is grayed out. I even trying cheating by leaving the net connection alive until I got to that screen, which made the Upgrade option available, and just before clicking on the Next button I pulled the connection. When I clicked on the Next button it whirred for a few moments and then announced that it could not continue because the connection was not available. In other words, selecting the Upgrade option from the Install window does exactly the same as if you just did sudo apt-get upgrade; that is, it downloads every single file needed for the upgrade from the net and takes nothing from the ISO media. That means that there is no longer any way to do a dist-upgrade without a net connection. While searching for a solution I came across the notion of apt-mirror. My (very dim) understanding is that you can create a local mirror of an Ubuntu repository to do upgrades or installs from. The instructions I read were here: http://www.packtpub.com/article/create-local-ubuntu-repository-using-apt-mirror-apt-cacher Supposedly about 15 GB of space is needed per distro for each architecture. This sounds doable to me. And it might be useful at the Clinic as well. In fact I have a bulky old 120 GB USB 2.0 hard drive that I am willing to donate to the cause. Perhaps the above instructions are out of date and perhaps the whole idea is bad, or maybe there are better ways to do it. What do y'all think? _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
