Introduction.

On the 18th October 2007, Ubuntu released their Gutsy Gibbon version of the popular operating system. Of course, you can download the new distro iso and burn it to a CD, but if you already have the Feisty Fawn version of Ubuntu, you can also upgrade it via the Internet. This also applies to Kubuntu, the KDE version of the system, which is what this page is all about. In theory, it should be really easy, but in practice, it turned out to be a little different. In truth, I don't know if it was just a glitch with my particular installation, or whether it is rather more widespread, but what follows is how I completed the upgrade, in the hope it may help someone else. It should be noted, this is not meant to be the definitive way to carry out this operation, but simply a way that worked for me. Much of it is derived from research I carried out and therefore may appear a little messy; but here goes!

The Problem.

In theory, when a new upgrade is available, a button in your package manager (Adept in my case) should become live and it should be just a matter of pressing it and it should all happen. Sadly, my button stayed firmly greyed out, and an alternative way had to be found.

Pre-installation.

Everywhere you look, it is recommended you make sure your current installation is up to date, so use Adept (or whatever you prefer) to update your distro. But before you start, keep in mind as you are about to carry out an upgrade, the upgrade process will probably not upgrade third party repositories. Therefore, it is essential you disable these repositories before you update the system. To do this, open up Adept and click on Adept, (top left): Now select: Manage Repositories This page will appear: Now click on the Third-Party Software tab and deselect any entries in there (clear the boxes to the left of the entries). Once you do this and close the pop-up screen, you will get an advisory pop-up that will tell you The Information is out of date. Click on Reload and Adept will update itself. Now look at the bottom of the screen to see if updates are required. The give away is, if the Apply Changes button has become live, your distro has some work to do. At this point, you can if you so wish, review the changes about to be made by clicking the Preview Changes button, before you commit to the update.

The Upgrade.

In order to overcome my lack of Full Upgrade button, I discovered I could load an Update Manager, which in fact is for Gnome, but works just as well in Kubuntu. In fact I did this from the command line using the following command:

#> sudo apt-get install update-manager

But equally, you could just scroll down in Adept and install it from there. Having completed that, go to the K menu button (bottom left of your screen) and click on Run Command, or use Alt+F2 to achieve the same thing. In the box type the following:

gksu "update-manager -c"

including the quotes ("). This will launch the program and you will see this: Notice it says the system is up to date (the work we did earlier), but that a New distribution release '7.10' is available Click on the Upgrade button and this is what you will see: The Release Notes and the opportunity to click on Upgrade again. It's worth mentioning here, that all documentation refers to Ubuntu, but don't worry, the system will recognise you are using Kubuntu and will download the correct files for the upgrade. Be brave! Click on Upgrade and this is what you will see: It's essentially a sophisticated script that will run to complete all the actions required to upgrade your operating system. Following the preparatory work, you'll see this next: This means the repositories are being changed from Feisty to Gutsy. Next you will see a warning if some of your existing files are no longer required or supported; like this: Finally, you get your last chance to back out of the upgrade; like this: You can see how many packages are going to be replaced and so on and even with a 1MB Internet (Broadband) connection, it's going to take the best part of two hours to complete. Click on Start Upgrade and away you go: If you have specific extra software, you may get messages such as this: and you would then need to take the appropriate action. Next, it cleans up and gives you the option to save old files if you want to: And finally, it restarts the system; the only time it needs to do this: Yes!!!