This is Alan Pope with the eleventh screencast in the Ubuntu Month of screencasts.
All the screencasts in this month can be downloaded for free from our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com
In this screencast we are going to look at updating and upgrading the system.
First of all we will look at applying some updates to a system.
Now this system is running Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake
and you can see here, we have some updates waiting.
The little orange icon shows there are 16 updates pending
Now that little orange icon, if I click on it will start the update manager.
Which you can also get to from System -> Administration -> Update Manager.
The Update Manager is the tool that allows us to update and upgrade the system
and also perform a distribution upgrade.
That is to upgrade the system from one release to another.
Right now we're just going to apply some updates.
Along with that we also have the Software Properties application.
Which in later releases of Ubuntu is called Software Sources.
We need our password to run these, because they make fundamental changes to the system
and so for our own protection we need a password.
Software Preferences here show us the various channels as they are called in 6.06
and these are repositories where software can be downloaded from.
And over here on the right we have buttons to manage these channels.
We can add additional channels, remove them, edit existing channels
and also add CD-ROMS.
We can switch off certain channels and turn them back on again.
By switching off a channel,
you stop the system being able to get updates from that channel.
You stop software updates coming from there.
If we click edit, you can see that each channel is further divided into components
and these components relate to the main, restricted, universe
and multiverse repositories.
So within one channel we have a number of components,
which groups together software based on certain criteria about the software,
such as their supportability or their license.
Again we can switch off the individual components.
You may want only officially supported software,
in which case you could switch off the other three components,
leaving only officially supported and then tick the others
as and when you choose you want to add software from those repositories.
But once you switch one of these on, it makes sense to leave it switched on,
You can see the components there are called main, restricted,
universe and multiverse.
All I did there was click the Custom button.
We can add additional channels
and by clicking custom I can paste in here a line for a third party repository.
You'll see that in the next screencast, installing applications.
Now you can see here we have the many different channels
There's a channel here for updates to software.
There's one for backports, which is software that's been
ported back to this version of Ubuntu from a higher release.
This is 6.06 and this channel contains software
that has been ported back from a higher release of Ubuntu.
There's another one here that I've manually added in here, dapper-proposed.
This is for packages that have been maybe updated in some way
and they are not in the main repository yet.
They're just in there being tested by people who have that repository enabled.
And finally there's the security updates channel where
updates to packages that have had security vulnerabilities for example get put.
You'll notice also that all of mine have Binary next to them.
I don't have repositories for source code to download,
if I wanted to I could add those in
and that would allow me download the source code
for any application in the repositories.
The system checks for updates on a regular basis,
mine is set to check every day
and if there are any updates
the little orange icon in the top right of the screen will be displayed,
as you can see there.
We can get it to download updates in the background, but not actually install them.
That's useful if you leave your PC on, you can download the updates,
and then when you get back to your desk and you click the update,
it will install them from the local cache.
And there's an extra option here for installing security updates without confirmation.
Some people might prefer to do that.
The authentication tab is where you can add a cryptographic key,
so that you can authenticate or validate that packages are coming from
the source that they appear to be coming from.
The packages supplied by Ubuntu are cryptographically signed
and many third party vendors also cryptographically sign theirs.
So if you were to add a custom channel in here
and add someone's third party repository,
you may also then go to the authentication tab
and import the key from that third party.
So that you can prove that those packages do come from
where they say they come from.
Now if you make any changes in the Software Preferences,
at the point when you close it asks you to reload.
What that means is update, so this is what we call update,
it's going on-line to find out what packages are in those repositories.
It's not actually downloading or installing any packages,
it's just updating the local list.
So update is updating the local list of packages that are in an on-line repository.
You can see here there are 16 updates waiting on the system
and if I click on that...
...we can see all of those 16 updates.
We can see the names of the packages listed here
and it's a short list it's not a huge number of updates.
Now these are packages where the software may have had bugs
or there may have been security holes in those packages.
And so they have been updated and put in the repository
my system has checked the repository
and I can force it to check the repository by clicking the Check button.
And now that my system knows that there are updated packages in the repository,
I can then choose to update those packages.
Notice the little icon in the top goes gray while this program is running,
you should only have one package management program running at once.
So if I highlight one of these applications, libcurl3,
which is apparently a multi-protocol file transfer library.
We can see the new version number
and down here if I click show details,
we can even see the changes that were made.
Now this isn't always maintained, but most of the time it is.
LP stands for Launchpad, which is the website launchpad.net
and this bug number 137849,
is basically the reason why this package was updated,
because there was a bug in that application.
There's also a description of what the package is.
So based on this information you could actually pick and choose
which updates you want to install.
So for example here, linux-image, is a package that contains the Linux kernel.
This is a pretty fundamental part of our system
and you can see there are a number of changes made here.
This CVE number here refers to a public security vulnerability list.
So you could search for that number on-line
and find out more details about that security vulnerability
and what the impact of it is.
and you could make a decision for your self whether you install these updates or not.
Generally it's recommended that you just install them,
but you can untick them and choose not to install certain updates
For example if you were to update this package here,
it's quite large, it's 8 MB in size.
And if you have a low speed Internet connection,
now might not be a convenient time to do that.
So you might choose not to upgrade that right now.
You can see the total changes down the bottom as you tick and untick the packages.
If I hit install updates, you can see it now downloads the packages.
So this is going to the on-line repositories,
that we have in our Software Properties,
downloading the new versions of these packages,
It will store them locally, so it downloads them all first.
and then stores them locally
and then it will install them from that staging area on your local hard drive.
So now it's unpacking those packages and going to install the packages.
And once that's finished our system will be up to date.
Now for most of the packages it's going to install,
we don't need to restart the system.
There are very few occasions when you need to reboot the system.
But in this example we are replacing the Linux kernel.
and if we replace the Linux kernel we do need to reboot for the changes to take effect.
You can see there it's now doing Linux modules
and various other bits to do with the kernel.
There's also xserver,
xserver is the core component behind this graphical windowing interface,
so you might need to restart the graphical environment
and not just the whole PC
So now it's finished doing the updates.
There we go, all the updates are done.
You can look at that text and read it, most people don't though.
When I click close it goes again to check if there are any updates pending.
and there we can see it says the system is up to date.
We can even force it to go on-line and check that there are no new packages,
it's not likely that there are in the
two or three minutes between me last checking and now.
but you never know.
So now I've performed those updates you can see here it's telling me I need to restart.
And I need to restart because as I said the kernel has been upgraded.
If you click the icon and then you can choose either restart later or restart now.
So that's doing updates, let's have a look at doing a distribution upgrade.
Now again we've got Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake
and if I run the Update Manager, on Dapper Drake,
to see if there are any updates, any changes to packages.
When can see if there are any pending changes.
And there aren't any.
Now it says my system is up to date.
I can force it to check and because I've just done all these updates,
the system is up to date.
But what if I wanted to upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu.
This is 6.06, what if I wanted to upgrade to 6.10?
Ubuntu supports upgrades, full upgrades, they're called distribution upgrades.
from one release to the next release.
You can't skip releases, you have to go directly from one release to the next,
and this is all quite well documented on the Ubuntu documentation website
and the community wiki.
If you go to wiki.ubuntu.com, you can search for the word upgrade
and there are many pages, including this one.
This one is about upgrades to Dapper,
this is upgrading from an older release to version 6.06
and it gives you information about things you should do
before you attempt to upgrade your system
before you do a distribution upgrade.
And tells you which versions you can upgrade from.
Similarly there's another page called EdgyUpgrades
and this is useful for people going to Edgy, which is want I'm about to do.
So I want to upgrade from version 6.06 to 6.10
and it gives me how to do it just here.
So if you want to upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10,
run the following command, press Alt+F2.
So if I press Alt+F2, I'll get a dialog box pop up
and I can type that command in.
and there is our dialog, so I just pressed Alt + F2
and I type in exactly what it says, sudo update-manager -c.
Now update-manager is the Update Manager program we have been using all along.
Now what we are saying is pass it a parameter -c.
Now the -c is going to check for distribution upgrades,
to see if there is another release after the version I am currently on.
Now 6.06 doesn't automatically show you that, you have to tell it to show you that.
because 6.06 is a long term support release,
so it doesn't automatically offer upgrades to the next version.
So you can see here there is a new distribution release (6.10) available.
So I'm currently on 6.06 and if I press this button,
I can upgrade to 6.10
Now as soon as I do that I will no longer be on the long term support release,
I will no longer be on Dapper.
So you need to think carefully about why you're currently running Dapper,
as to whether you would upgrade to the next version.
And once you start the upgrade, it does a lot of preparation
and disables, as part of the preparation, any third party sources.
So remember I said, in the Software Properties, you can add third party repositories.
They get disabled during the upgrade, because they can cause problems for the upgrade,
the upgrade could fail.
It's going to update the software channels
and make them reflect the new release.
So at the moment the software channels point to
the repositories for Dapper, which is 6.06,
this is going to modify them and point them to the repositories for Edgy, 6.10
Now we get a summary here saying are you sure you want to do this?
So this is the last part at which we can back out.
901 packages upgraded, it gives me an estimated time of how long it's going to take.
So it reckons about an hour
and there's lots and lots of packages that are going to get changed.
Now I have a relatively fast Internet connection here,
so I'm lucky in that when I click start upgrade it will go pretty quickly.
But I'm going to fast forward through most of this.
Because you don't really want to sit and watch my upgrade run for an hour.
So what I'm going to do is just pause it at points when interesting things occur.
So you can see there, it's fetching the packages.
If we go back to the website, wiki.ubuntu.com
Again you can search for the upgrade pages,
In the top right hand corner of the web site there's a search function.
or you can do as I've done here, just put the word upgrades on the end
and it finds all pages with the word upgrades in.
So there's a separate page for each release.
and the page we're following is EdgyUpgrades,
because we are upgrading to Edgy, which is 6.10
So you can see here it says this is the method we are "Upgrading using Update Manager".
And down here is the not recommended method, which is using the command-line,
a terminal, to actually type a bunch of commands in, to do the upgrade.
Generally this isn't necessary, in some circumstances it has been found to be required.
but most of the time you can upgrade using Update Manager, as we are here.
So we've skipped a bit of time there to
make things move along a little bit quicker in the screencast.
Not long now.
So it's going to need a quite a bit of disk space for this upgrade,
because it needs enough space for all of the packages in their compresses form, the .debs
these Debian archives,
to be stored on my hard drive along with the packages as they're unpacked as well.
and disk space checking is one of the things the Update Manager does.
So now it's starting to go about actually go about installing the various packages.
and sometimes it will stop and ask you questions.
For example if there are configuration files that you have changed,
global configuration files that you have changed.
that there is a new version of in the new release.
It might ask you to just compare and in fact here is an example right now.
This configuration file has differences and it shows the differences,
with one file has the minus signs in front
and the other file has plus signs in front.
So you can see both lines and compare the two at once.
So you can see three lines from the old file and three lines from the new file.
and you decide whether you want to keep the file,
which you might do if you've made changes to that, if you knowingly made changes
or you can replace it if you don't think you've made a change to that file,
or you don't care if that file gets replaced.
So if I hit replace, I'll be taking the new version of the file.
Now you noticed the background just changed,
because that's been updated in the new version of Ubuntu.
Generally I would just leave this alone,
walk away, watch TV, get a cup of tea or something,
because it can take some time.
Here's another file that's been changed in the upgrade,
looks like it's just got lots of extra comments in it.
So we'll just take the new version, by replacing my existing version.
And we are nearly done.
There we go it's cleaning up
and what it's going to do is check for any packages which are no longer supported.
or packages that are no longer required,
maybe they've been replaced or obsoleted.
Okay, here are some packages which are not in the main repository any more,
they've been moved to the universe repository and are so maintained by the community,
and not maintained directly by canonical.
It's a kind of informational message.
and it will also give us a list of packages that will be removed,
because there are some packages that get renamed in the upgrade,
names change or version change so fundamentally that the old ones are now useless.
So some of these packages, well all of the these are now going to be removed.
You can skip it of course and leave them, but it's kind of pointless leaving them,
unless you explicitly know you need one of those packages.
You'll notice at the top-right it says system restart required.
And it needs a restart, it definitely needs a restart
because right now we've got a brand new kernel,
brand new video drivers, brand new everything,
and so we really need to restart for those changes to take effect.
There we go, that's it!
That's an upgrade, a distribution upgrade from 6.06 to 6.10, done
Now if I restart, the hostname still says Dapper, so the name of the computer says Dapper,
but I'll change that later on.
And if we log on, we're now running the same machine,
but it's now running a newer version of Ubuntu, it's running 6.10
Everything seems to be working okay so far.
And if we go to the Update Manager,
actually if we look in Software Sources first.
Of course we need to type in our password,
because this can make fundamental changes to the system.
You can see now it says we are running Ubuntu 6.10
Yeah, that works and this whole interface has changed actually,
from what we were looking at earlier in 6.06
So you can see we've definitely got, if nothing else,
a new version of the Software Sources application.
which is great.
So that's distribution upgrading.
Now let's look at distribution upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy.
Now the system I'm running here, let's check Software Sources.
You can see it no longer has the version number next to Ubuntu software.
But this looks familiar and if you look under updates
you can now see it says feisty security, feisty updates,
so this system we're looking at now is Ubuntu Feisty version 7.04
Now what I'm going to do is upgrade this to Gutsy,
which is currently under development, I don't recommend you do this right now.
Wait until October, when Gutsy is released.
If we run update manager...
...there are no updates waiting, no packages that are pending upgrade.
And if we go and have a look at the Software Sources,
I'm going to switch on one of the updates.
There is a repository called Feisty proposed
and these are pre-released updates.
And now the reason why I'm switching this one on
is in order to upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy,
so that is from 7.04 to 7.10, there's an known bug in the update manager
and we want to kind of work around that, in this screencast.
So by switching on pre-release updates
there are going to be some extra updates that I'm going to see in the Update Manger,
which we didn't see just now.
And one of them is going to be an update to the Update Manager itself.
So starting the update manager now, now that we've added to Feisty proposed repository,
you can see 16 updates, and one of them is Update Manager.
Now you'll notice that the version number has gone from 1.0.59.23 to 1.0.59.25
and I'm going to untick all of them
and then just tick Update Manager and Update Manager Core,
because those are the only two packages I really need right now
to perform the upgrade to Gutsy.
And again I wouldn't recommend that you install Gutsy right now.
or upgrade to it, because it's a little unstable,
it's only three weeks until it's released, the current date.
But right now I wouldn't upgrade to it.
Although I have to say I do run it on all my systems and it works pretty well for me.
So if we go to launchpad there's a bug 141060,
which is the bug that I'm working around,
so this is the reason why I've added that Feisty proposed repository to
so that can get the newer version of Update Manager.
which I know will now allow me to upgrade to Gutsy.
Now previously to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, from 6.06 to 6.10,
I pressed Alt + F2 and I ran update-manger -c
like this gksu update-manager -c
Now that's what I did to go from Dapper, which is a currently supported release,
to Edgy, which is another currently supported release.
But what I want to do is go from Feisty, which is also a currently supported release,
to Gutsy which is a development release, it's not currently released yet
and you can see it doesn't actually offer me, at the top of the Update Manager window,
it doesn't offer me the upgrade to Gutsy.
What you have to do is run update-manager -c -d, to upgrade
and what the -d means effectively upgrade to the development release.
So you can see now it's offering me the option of upgrading to 7.10
And this is the way in which you can upgrade to the next release,
even if that next version hasn't actually been released yet.
So you can see here it says, this is a development snapshot,
it's not the final version yet.
So it's generally recommended you don't do what I'm about to do,
but it's worth knowing how to do it.
And now it starts doing the upgrade and it's running through the upgrade
in exactly the same way as it ran from Dapper to Edgy.
Everything's working in much the same way,
you can see there it says it's upgrading Ubuntu to version 7.10
Okay
And it's doing pretty much the same thing.
Now I'm not going to show you this right to the end.
because it works in pretty much the same way as in every distribution upgrade.
Shows you a list of packages that are no longer supported.
and so on, so this is all pretty much the same as it was
with the distribution upgrade we just did from Dapper to Edgy.
So now it says it's going to upgrade 870 packages
and it's going to take some time to do it.
Hit start
and that's it.
So that's how we upgrade from a currently released version of Ubuntu
to the next release which is still under development.
use update-manger -c -d
Once that version Gutsy is released,
we won't need the -d, in fact you don't need the -c either,
because Feisty will offer an upgrade to Gutsy, once Gutsy is released.
Okay, so once we upgrade to Gutsy, which we have now done.
This is my Gutsy version 7.10 system, how do we apply updates here?
Well it's actually exactly the same as we have seen in previous releases.
The Update Manager has changed slightly, it's been updated,
it's got a new icon for a start.
And you can see some of the added features,
I'll show you a couple of features that are quite nice
First we will check and see if there are any new packages.
Two of the things that are quite good with the new version of Update Manager,
it shows you the version, this has been around since Feisty actually,
it shows you the old version of a package that you currently have.
and the new version.
Whereas Update Manager in Dapper, that we saw right at the beginning of the screencast,
only shows you the new version of the package.
So here you can see a bunch of packages that need upgrading
and you can see the from version and the to version.
So the from version is what I'm currently on and the to version what I'm going to.
Another nice feature is that these launchpad bugs LP for example,
link to Launchpad, so you can actually click those links
and it will take you straight to Launchpad,
where you can then view the bug
and then that will help you decide whether you want to upgrade that package or not.
So for example if I click that link, it will open up my web browser Firefox,
and take me directly to bug number 144001
and you can see here the status of this bug is fix released.
And the package is apt and sure enough that's this apt package.
So updates in Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy are all pretty straightforward to do.
And there you can see a simple click of the install will download the packages
and update them on my local machine.
The Software Sources application under Gutsy
again looks much the same as it does under previous releases.
Let's have a look at it while those packages are downloading and installing.
Again it's grouped everything into main, universe, restricted and multiverse.
and we have our option for downloading source code
and where we get our packages from, what regional server.
And then we can add CD-ROM repositories as well.
We can also add in third party repositories, using the third party software tab.
And we'll look at that in the next screencast, we'll add in a third party repository
and we'll install some software from that third party repository.
We can also add a CD-ROM and configure the updates.
And you can see here Gutsy updates,
Gutsy proposed and Gutsy backports don't make any sense right now to have those enabled.
because there's nothing in them,
because there is nothing to backport from, there isn't anything after Gutsy yet.
and Gutsy proposed, well everything is still in the main Gutsy repository.
So there's nothing proposed to go into Gutsy yet, because it has not been released yet.
And we also get the same kind of options at the bottom to do with automatic updates.
Again if we add third party repositories we can add their key,
so that we can check the cryptographic signature
And there is an extra little tab over here,
which is to do with an application called popularity contest or popcon.
And you may remember if you saw the screencast where we did installing Ubuntu
we enabled popcon and enabling popcon ticks this little box..
And it, as you can see from the text here it submits data back to Ubuntu,
about which applications users have installed and how much they get used.
The reason for keeping this information
is so that they can figure out which applications are most popular
and from that help to determine which applications need most focus
and which applications will appear on CD-ROMs and DVDs.
If we go to the website for the Popularity Contest, which is popcon.ubuntu.com
you can actually see the results of the data that's been submitted to Ubuntu
And that data is in the form of great long lists of packages, it's quite raw data.
So if we go to popcon.ubuntu.com, and there's ReadMes and Frequently Asked Questions
and all kind of other documentation here.
And if we just click on one of the files,
it shows us a list of packages in the first column
and then how many people have it installed
and number of people that use it regularly.
number of people who have it installed who don't use it regularly and so on.
And the last column is the name of the maintainer of that particular package.
So as you can see there are a lot of packages at the top of the list,
which are very popular, very common, everyone has them.
And then near the middle towards the bottom,
there are packages that are used slightly less.
So yeah, very few people have some of these packages installed.
Maybe that only one person uses one of these packages
It's entirely likely that that's the author of the package.
So that's just a brief introduction to what popcon is
and how that provides useful information to Ubuntu.
Maybe you should switch that on
So here you can see the install of the updates is running
in much the same way as it does in all releases.
You can see down here it's updating my kernel, my Linux kernel.
There we go it's nearly finished.
Done
So now I've got a system running Ubuntu Gutsy version 7.10, which is out in October 2007.
And I've got all the latest packages on my system.
Very straight forward, very easy.
There we go, my system is up to date.
So now you have seen how to update and upgrade,
both older versions of Ubuntu, Dapper.
But also newer versions such as Feisty and Gutsy.
And we've upgraded the kernel, so it now needs to reboot.
Thanks for watching,
All our screencasts are available from our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com