I am currently running Ubuntu 16.04 on my server. It is my main HTPC + media server, LTSP PXE boot server for satellite media centers in the house along with a few other things.

I like to stay supported so I decided now was a good time to upgrade. I opted for a fresh install and have so far tried Debian Stretch, Buster, and Ubuntu 18.04. Thankfully I am partitioned with LVM so I have free space and haven't had to risk my working 16.04 installation.

All 3 are unusable for my purposes right now. Stretch has an issue with Kodi where it plays videos from my playlist and after a bit only plays the first 30 seconds, then jumps to the next video. Buster and 18.04 have an nbd-server? issue and I am unable to pxe boot my remote media centers. I'm still tracking that down.

The bottom line is I don't know what to do. I know I am supported till April of 2021. But I don't want to get to far behind. Normally I am all for upgrading as needed but I have no upgrade path without losing something essential right now.

So the question is... Do I just leave it on 16.04 for the foreseeable future, maybe try Ubuntu 20.04 when it rolls out? Just leave it alone until it dies altogether and live without it being current? Keep trying to debug the nbd-server issue and or the Kodi issue with Buster and Bionic?

Whatever you decide to do, let us know if the 18.04 bionic ndb issue is resolved with either the 18.04 or the 16.04.

My problems with 18.04 have been minimal and I am interested in the result. I did check the man pages concerning the ndb issue an did a little internet search but came up with nothing conclusive. Can you tell us some of the commands that you tried to either the resolve the issue with 18.04 or 16.04?

Due to your special needs, as of now, I would try and resolve the issue with the 16.04 for the foreseeable future.

The bug is similar to this one, if not the same. The end result on boot is the same.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=846998

I've tried the fixes to no avail. I will continue testing with an 18.04 container serving LTSP to a virtual machine on my laptop for now to test with. It is very puzzling.

As far as Debian Stretch goes, I had it installed and working perfectly last night. However today I started to get the playlist stopping. Turned out to be read errors. They didn't pop up until I had been playing media for 30 minutes or so, then it was every 10-30 seconds. Tried a movie, same thing. Died after 15 seconds. I'm thinking the Debian version of Kodi has an NFS bug that is talked about on the Kodi forums. They aren't much help though, they don't support Debian Kodi as Debian mucks about with the code in some way (I don't understand what that means exactly).

At the moment I've reset grub to my 16.04 install. I've got until April of 2021 I suppose to sort stuff out so it's no rush, just hate to let it get away from me. My time is random, sometimes I have to much free time. Others I won't have free time for a month.

I took a few days away from the problem and came back to it. I posted the error and what not in another thread. After getting to googling most of the day yesterday I found my answer. I think it had to do with LTSP expecting dnsmasq as a proxy dhcp server. Regardless the answer is here.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...er-4175647759/

So, do you think you are ready to upgrade to 18.04 now, or are there still issues to iron out?

When I upgrade to a new major version of Mint, I do exactly as you have been doing. I run a dual boot of my current version and the new version, working out any issues and bugs with the new version (I usually get on the bus early by installing the beta). Once I'm happy to make the leap to making the newer version my default working system, I do so, confident that I can always revert to the older version if I need to (I keep the older one around for a wee while until I'm so confident in the new system that I make images of the older version to an external backup and then delete it). I hope that makes sense.

I'm hopeful. This was my only hang up. I've migrated all of my services into LXD containers, all of which are 18.04 already. Just the host is 16.04 now. I'm currently configuring a container for LTSP on 18.04. Once set up I'll pxe boot my media centers for a week or two and see how they go. Assuming all is well, I think I've finally ironed it out and am expecting to upgrade within a week or so after testing my machines with the container.

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Nice. All the best with the move.

Great!
greencedar