[sclug] Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.20 upgrade problem.

[John Barron]

On Sunday 20 May 2007 18:41:35 Neil Haughton wrote:
> I'm having an upgrade 'mare with Ubuntu. I'm trying to upgrade from 6.06
> to 6.10 using the online upgrade facility on the Ubuntu website. The
> installation keeps aborting with a message telling me that my /var
> partition needs at least 256Mb of free space - but I have over 500Mb of
> free space on that partition (/var has its own partition).
>
> This appears to be some sort of apt-get issue. Can anyone tell me how to
> overcome it?
>

Well, not an answer to your question, exactly, but why use the online upgrade 
facility anyway?

I've just upgraded from 6.06 Dapper to 7.04 Feisty on our main computer, and I 
followed my usual process of leaving '/home/' untouched (it's the only one I 
keep on a separate partition), nuking '/'  and reinstalling fresh, it's not 
as though installation takes long and then I just apt-get in whatever 
applications etc need adding in. If it really went pear-shaped I could always 
reinstall Dapper by the same method, though that's unlikely I think, I 
skipped Edgy 6.10 intentionally because I didn't fancy the first release 
after the long-term-support version.

So far I've found that kind of reinstallation the simplest and cleanest method 
to upgrade in my experience, was never really interested in messing about 
with 'upgrade-in-place' functions I didn't necessarily trust. The only thing 
I find is that doing things that way is one more reason to stick to 
free/libre applications that I can pull in from the standard repos 
afterwards, rather than proprietary crap where I have to keep hold of the 
software to reinstall afterwards, if it even still works on the new version.

anyway best of luck with it, even though, I wouldn't start there if I was 
trying to get to Dublin :-)

--
John