Personal Education
Sometimes things go wrong, especially if you are in a hurry.
I recently decided to move from the Kubuntu long term support (LTS) version 14.04 to the current 15.04 so I could see the new Plasma in action and get the benefits of the underlying Frameworks 5.
I started upgrading with the Muon upgrader tool and things seemed to go okay as the upgrade from 14.04 to 14.10 completed. I went to bed. In the morning, I continued, expecting to go from 14.10 to 15.04. The upgrade stalled with Muon. My inner geek said “try using the command line apt-get tool.” Sadly, the inner geek was as bummed out as me when messages about failure popped up all over the place.
I did not trust leaving things in a mess. The programs I use regularly worked, but I was worried I did not actually have a stable 14.10 system and that it would decide to stop suddenly in the middle of important work.
The outer geek decided the next step was to do a fresh install of 15.04. After a download of the latest version of the ISO file, I burned it to a USB thumb drive with Unetbootin.
A reboot from the USB gave me the option to install Kubuntu which I proceded to do, choosing to manually set the disk drive partitions. I had set the partitions for separate root and /home partitions when installing 14.04 LTS, so it was possible to ask only to reformat the root partition for the install and to keep the current home partition (saving all my files).
Less than two hours later, I was back in business, only needing to reinstall a few programs that are not part of the base system.
Inner geek and outer geek are happy and getting used to the new “look and feel.” of Plasma.
I’ve even upgraded to LibreOffice 5.