FAQ

Disaster recovery

In case a power failure happens during a upgrade, the system will be in a pretty bad state. The following should make it easier to recover:

For hardy (8.04), please boot into recovery mode, select root shell and then run:

$ wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/14251233/friendly-recovery_0.2%7Eppa1_all.deb
$ dpkg -i friendly-recovery_0.2~ppa1_all.deb
$ exit

then there should be a "Repair broken packages" option. Please use that option to bring the system back into better shape. The repair option is a default feature of 8.10 (but did not make it for 8.04).

Upgrade modes

When a release upgrade is performed there are two modes of operation:

• desktop
• server

Those can be controlled via "update-manager --mode" or "do-release-upgrade --mode".

In "desktop" mode the release-upgrader will care about meta-packages like ubuntu-desktop (or kubuntu-desktop), ubuntu-standard etc. If they are missing, it will put them back.

In "server" mode it will ignore meta-packages and just do a "apt-get dist-upgrade" equivalent then. It will inspect the installed tasks and update them (if needed).

Upgrade gui

There are also different user interfaces for the release upgrader. Those can be changed via "--frontend" and the following are available "DistUpgradeViewText", "DistUpgradeViewGtk", "DistUpgradeViewKDE".

Defaults

When running "update-manager" it will run the release upgrader with "gui=gtk" and "mode=desktop" by default.

When running "do-release-upgrade" it will run with "gui=text" and "mode=server" by default.