The Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft) distribution went live last week and I finally decided to upgrade from 6.06 (Dapper Drake). I use an Ubuntu distro to do some of my work here at my company so I figured I would upgrade to the latest, bleeding-edge distro because I enjoy using it.
I updated my /etc/apt/sources.list file to point at the Edgy repositories and executed the next phase of my plan.
sudo apt-get update
So far so good.
sudo apt-get upgrade
This is where my plan failed. Note that you should not tell your 6.06 distro to update it’s files from the 6.10 repositories…
After downloading 400 MB of updates I rebooted to find that I could not start Xwindows, or anything else for that matter.
I rebooted into the recovery mode, fired up a terminal and executed: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Thankfully it rebooted and came back up after performing the upgrade. I spent the next hour cleaning up mismatched files. Unfortunately, Synaptix, the Ubuntu package manager, likes me to run a distribution upgrade every time I reboot the system…
(update: after the fourth upgrade I am not getting prompted. woohoo!)
