So I finally stopped ignoring the fact that my Ubuntu version was no longer supported and decided to upgrade. It was painful. It was stupid. And so here I am typing about it for (hopefully) someone else's benefit.
Started with Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwal). Tried using the Update Manager to go to 11.10. It kept failing with lots of Hash Sum Mismatch errors. I tried everything I could find via google, which was quite often:
sudo rm -fR /var/lib/apt/lists/*
and then update / upgrade apt-get and try it again. No dice. Hash Sum Mismatch. I tried removing all of the sources except the main Canonical. Still no.
Ok fine, more googling turns up apt-get clean, apt-get autoclean, etc... still no dice.
Finally I wanted to see what was failing. First run through, I copy-pasted the failed list. Emacs tells me there are 253 lines. On a whim I tried it again (sign of insanity is what?) and lo and behold 240 lines. There is some timeout issue (JUST A GUESS!) causing files to not finish downloading. It's quite the pain in the ass. But subsequent requests pull more and more of it correctly. After the 4th or 5th run through of that (150ish lines remaining) I decided there must be a better way.
And here it is. Use the command line. This is what I did, you might not need to do it. But it won't hurt.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade
y (enter)
Repeat. Over and Over. At least its much faster to iterate via the CLI. Finally the light at the end of the tunnel. Answer a few questions on upgrading and then the only thing left was postgres.
sudo su postgres
pg_dropcluster --stop 9.1 main
pg_upgradecluster 8.4 main
take a minute to run pgadmin and verify the upgrade was golden (it was) and then
pg_dropcluster 8.4 main
Yay 11.10. And then I made the mistake of re-enabling other sources, poke around a bit... and then decide to move up to 12.04. I assume the intermediary step was required for the change to Unity. So... fire up the Update Manager. Problems. Ok disable other sources, run again. Hash Sum Mismatch. You've gotta be fraking kidding me. At least this time it only took 3 iterations.
But the point of all this IS... if you keep doing sudo rm -fR /var/lib/apt/lists/* and cleaning apt-get... you'll never get anywhere.
If this keeps up (its been going for a while it appears from the google results) I fear Ubuntu will lose quite a few users.
