Upgrading Ubuntu from CD
 

I have installed and working ubuntu 6.06. I downloaded feisty fawn yesterday and tried doiing an upgrade by booting from the cd.
The cd does not boot properly it starts to load and will almost finish nad then I get errors that X won't start or some service failed to start. It also gets to the point sometimes where the desktop is almost loaded but then hangs. After this I downloaded another copy and tried that with the same results.
My 6.06 installation works fine but I really would like to try the new one. I was wondering if I can somehow start the upgrade process from within Ubuntu either from the net or directly from the cd?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

Upgrading via the net is the preferred way.

OK, I've found an excellent article that describes exactly what to do to edit the apt sources.list file and then complete the upgrade over the net. The only problem i'm having is whne I try to do:

sudo sed -e ’s/\sdapper/ edgy/g’ -i /etc/apt/sources.list

to edit my souces list, I get this error back:

sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command:

Any suggestions other than editing the whole file manually?

If you searched a little more, you found an article (it was probably at Ubuntu Wiki or something close to that) that tells you to use the graphical (software) update tool with a special switch (launched from the command line), which makes the update tool upgrade your whole Ubuntu version, including editing the sources file.

That's dapper -> edgy. If you want to upgrade to feisty, and you're using dapper, you need to upgrade dapper -> edgy then edgy -> feisty, which in my opinion takes a whole lot of time and can cause a lot of trouble (or then not, who knows). I'm not sure if Dapper has this "web upgrade" functionality really working, I think it was only in Edgy that it was "supported". It still probably works, yes, but things have changed between the versions and you are likely to get some trouble that you need to fix manually. For the sed command, read
to understand what it does and then why it doesn't work for you..it's probably just faster to go trough the file manually, there are really not that much words..and you can use a regular text editor with search&replace and replace every "dapper" with "edgy" (and later on "edgy" with "feisty" - you can't probably do this directly "dapper" - "feisty", but need to do it one version at a time), and it should work almost as easily as with sed.

Well, like I said, it's going to be a hard process. It takes time to load all the stuff from the web, twice if you want Feisty, and if your network happened to get cut in the middle of it (or some packages trashed), you would have to start it all over, cleaning the half-done upgrade traces first. A friendly advice: only do the downloading once, like you did with the Feisty disc, find out why it won't work properly (I'll have one advice lower on) and do a clean upgrade, along with formatting of your root and boot partitions, and have tons less trouble, plus spare a lot of time.

Why the Feisty disc won't boot..well, there can be a number of reasons, but I'd start off with video card. It's the most common reason. It's rather easy to ensure that; first calculate the md5sums and ensure they're ok (if you can, for the image you burnt the disc from, and if it's ok, then for the disk itself -- there should be md5sums on the disk also). Boot the disk and from the prompt hilight the "safe graphics" option (second topmost, if I'm right). Don't boot it yet; at the bottom of the screen you see some Fn keys along with their explanations; use the Fn key mentioned there to set your resolution to some very low (vesa-compatible) value, preferrably 800x600x16. Then hit the other Fn key that lets you edit the kernel commans before booting (you should now have the safe graphics boot line hilighted from the menu, before editing); alter the line by replacing the word "splash" with "nosplash". This disables the graphical loading screen, allowing you to see boot messages. The low resolution, on the other hand, ensures that your resolution is not causing trouble. Now hit enter to boot, and see if it gets farther..it did for me, on several machines that had this kinds of problems (no idea why graphics card/drivers can cause that many different kinds of problems, crashes and errors, but it seems they did..after setup, everything worked fine on high res).

Another trick to try is simply to download the Alternate install disc. It allows for text-mode installation, thus passing by possible graphics trouble during setup; after the setup you can configure (unless the setup does it for you already) your graphics devices, resolutions etc. as much as you want, but anyway the hardest part can be passed because during the setup you can't do too much magic with the graphics settings.

Software upgrade (trough package manager) might be "supported" by Ubuntu (I know it even notices you there's a new version, in Edgy and later, and asks if you want to upgrade to that), but it's still not half as good as a clean install from a setup disc, formatting the root and boot filesystems (if you have separate /home, don't format it - keep your settings and files); that ensures your system is installed properly, there are no traces of the old system messing things up, and you need to spend less time downloading.

Last I looked direct upgrade from Dapper to Feisty wasn't supported.
Was a while ago though.

I'll be using the Alternate CD when I finally decide to get off my bum and do it.

THanks for all the help everyone. I just edited the sources.list file manually and replaced all instances of dapper with edgy and removed the cd line as instatructed from the tutorial I read. After doing this I did apt-get update and then arpt-get dist-upgrade which seemed to have issues when installing iptables and some kde libraries. After the process finished I rebooted and X would no longer start (obviously something due to my botched upgrade), I'm just reinstall dapper from cd right now but I'd really like to try and upgrade to edgy at least and then fesity after. One step at a time right now though.
If there is something I'm missing in my current method that I have follow stricty from here: http://www.debianadmin.com/upgrade-u...-edgy-eft.html
Then it would be greatly apprecitaed if someone could point it out to me. Sorry I seem a little numb, I've been away from *nix in general for a few years and just trying to get back in.
Thanks again.

Upgrades are always potentially dodgy. I can't see you've done much wrong.
Including that "sed" command - looks like standard regex to me.