I'm currently trying to follow this tutorial:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab...guration-files

It says: "Ensure you have version 1.30 or above of tar available in your system."

When I type `tar --version`, I get:

`tar (GNU tar) 1.28`

How do I update "tar"? I tried googling around. I found how to update things using "tar", but not how to update "tar".

Thanks

EDIT: I'm using Ubunutu 16.04.5 LTS

It really depends on the Linux distribution you're using, as you would normally use software packages, but not all distributions use the same package managers.

So tell us which distribution you're using, and try opening your package manager and seeing if there is a better version of tar available.

Thanks jsbjsb001!

I'm using Ubunutu 16.04.5 LTS

I updated all my packages using this command `sudo -- sh -c 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -y; apt-get dist-upgrade -y; apt-get autoremove -y; apt-get autoclean -y'`, but "tar" is still stuck in year 2016 with version 1.28.

I'm not surprised you still have version 1.28 then. I suggest you download and install a more current version of Ubuntu, like Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS for starters.

You don't say which distribution you are using. So, first make sure the version of tar you have through your distribution's repository system doesn't work for whatever you are trying to do. If it doesn't then you will probably have to install manually. To do so go to https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/ and download the most current package, which I believe is in fact 1.30. It will be a compressed file. Uncompress it and then look in the uncompressed directory for an INSTALL or README file. It should have instructions or an installation program. Be aware if you are going to install a version without going through your distribution's system you may need to uninstall first through yum, apt-get or whatever your distro uses.

Yeah... but the issue is that the goal of this tutorial to backup my Gitlab and move it to a new Ubuntu 18.04 server.

So how can I move to Ubuntu 18.04, without backing up my Gitlab?

Thanks!

I'm using Ubunutu 16.04.5 LTS.

Ok, so why not just do a clean install of Ubuntu 18.04, and then backup your Gitlab?
If your stuff is online anyway; then what's it matter if you back it up after you install Ubuntu 18.04 ?

I wouldn't recommend doing a in-place upgrade for Ubuntu.

I'm not sure I understand what you suggest me to do.

I'm trying to :
1.Backup Gitlab on my old server (but I can't because it has Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 16.04 doesn't have tar 1.30)
2.Install Ubuntu 18.04 on a new server
3.Install Gitlab on a new server
4.Restore my Gitlab backup on the new server

There are a number of ways to backup your computer. I am not acquainted with gitlab, but you might simply use rsync to backup what you want. There are lots of other backup programs but many of them use rsync. It is best if you backup to another device other than your computer, another computer or an external drive that is not connected during the installation so there is no way for the update to destroy the backup. Then, either do a fresh install or update through ubuntu. One trick I will strongly suggest if you have the disk space is to repartition your hard drive. Gparted is great for this. If you know you are going to install a new system reduce you current system partition to a minimum size (gparted will show you how much is being used) and then create a new partition for the new system. Install the new system in the new partition. Then. mount the old partition somewhere, /mnt or somewhere, and you can copy any necessary files from the old to the new and you will have lost nothing. You can even boot into the old system if you need to.

No worries guys. I was able to follow to the tutorial with updating tar to 1.30. Tar version 1.28 was fine.

When I tried to install 1.30, I had some crazy error messages such as "configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH".

Glad it worked. However, I would still recommend following jsbjsb's suggestion and update to 18.04 LTS. Then you will be ok for several more years. Support for 16.04 runs out in the not too distant future.

Support for Ubuntu 16.04 runs out in April 2021. That's still quite a while to go.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

That's longer than I thought. Senior moment.

No worries, agillator. Support for the main Ubuntu distro itself normally lasts 5 years, although Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that 18.04 would be supported for 10 years (but gave no details). For the flavours (Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, etc.), the underlying base Ubuntu packages are supported for the 5 years but the flavour-specific parts (desktop environment etc.) are normally only supported for 3 years, although I'm not sure whether or not this extends to all flavours or just most of them. Hope that makes sense.