Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report

7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04”, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03”) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump.

I had a few packages installed from the Feisty Fawn universe and multiverse repositories (wordpress, clamav) on top of my Edgy Eft installation, and the mixed version setup worked well. Clamav was updated to depend on a library (libc, I think) that was not available in Edgy Eft, and Apt was smart enough to just leave clamav at the existing version. Also, I had made quite a few local customizations to configuration files for dovecot imapd (enabling non-secure IMAP connectons since they only happen over my home LAN), /etc/services (adding VMWare’s admin service and a second Subversion repository), and a couple of others.

I started by changing ‘edgy’ to ‘feisty’ in /etc/apt/sources.list, clearing out the old CD-ROM source line (from my original installation from ISO images) and duplicate universe and multiverse lines (from my mixed installation).

I then did apt-get update, and apt-get -d dist-upgrade ( -d means download but don’t install) and let that run (300+ MB of stuff to download, might as well let it run while I sleep).

This morning I ran apt-get dist-upgrade and babysat it. There were a couple of things that it said it would uninstall that I had to reinstall: libapache2-mod-python (needed by Trac), ruby18-elisp (not automatically upgraded to ruby19-elisp, but that was easy to manually install), and libnet-perl, which appears to be broken currently. That last one would seem to be the first of two genuinely broken things in this upgrade, though I can’t think of anything I use that depends on it.

There were a half dozen or so manual config file merges that I had to do; I wish one of the options were to attempt an automatic merge of the existing, customized version and the new, vanilla version. Nothing I changed really required manual intervention; all I did was what patch could have done just as easily. Tedious, but not really a problem. This effort probably added 5 minutes total.

After all that, it rebooted cleanly but Trac doesn’t work anymore. Apparently Trac depends on Clearsilver which reportedly is an antique and obsolete template system that isn’t currently built for Python 2.5, which is part of ubuntu-minimal on Feisty. I have a lead on fixing this manually but I haven’t done it yet. I expect this to be fixed for me in an official package in the next week or less; several folks know about it and say the fix is percolating through the package system already. So I might not bother with the manual fix.

The reboot went fine. I then updated VMware Server, which required a bit of manual assistance, but then it always does. Here’s what I did: VMWare Server in Feisty.

I haven’t upgraded my VPS yet but I’ll do that soon. I want to check with my VPS hosting support folks first to see if they know of any gotchas.

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