12 Dec 2008
tech
10 comments
Upgrading the MPC-L from Feisty

In a break from the norm, I have gone for a search friendly blog title as this is useful information that I couldn’t find myself

Currently, the Viglen MPC-L is shipped with Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty). As of October this year, Feisty is no longer supported so any attempt to update the software results in plenty of 404 error messages like. A trawl around with google finally found this Launchpad response.

Based on that, here are my notes for upgrading from Xubuntu 7.04 to 7.10.

  1. Check you really are on 7.04 by running: 
    :~$ lsb_release -a
  2. Disable the screensaver. Once running, the upgrade takes an hour or so and you do not want the screensaver to activate. Both AndySC and I found we couldn’t unlock the screen after the upgrade had completed overnight and the only thing to do was reboot. That said, the reboot didn’t harm the upgrade, but it is better to be safe.
  3. Download the Xubuntu 7.10 alternate CD ISO (torrent). It may seem obvious, but make sure you get the Xubuntu CD, not the Ubuntu one. Using the Ubuntu one will fail and you’ll have wasted half-an-hour downloading the ISO – I speak from personal experience.
  4. Mount the ISO locally: 
    :~$ sudo mount -o loop \
   ~/Desktop/xubuntu-7.10-alternate-i386.iso \
   /media/cdrom0
  5. A dialog will appear prompting you to upgrade from the CD. If it doesn’t appear, run: 
    :~$ gksu "sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade"
  6. When it asks if you would like to include the latest updates from the internets, you say “No”. If you say “Yes” you hit the same 404s you spent an hour trying solve before going down this path. Again, personal experience.
  7. After about a few minutes of sorting out what it needs to do it will start installing the new packages. I found it prompted me for input about 3 times early on in the ~1 hour install time and then ran to completion without further interaction – YMMV.
  8. Reboot as prompted and enjoy.

This should hopefully get you onto Gutsy, from where you can use the regular Update Manager to upgrade to Hardy and beyond.

Given the pain it is to upgrade from Feisty now, I hope Viglen will update their pre-install image soon. I’m also surprised that Ubuntu consider this an acceptable path even if Feisty is no longer supported.

Update: as per Andy’s notes, when you upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy, make sure the Universe repository is enabled, otherwise it will fail as the xubuntu-desktop package moved repositories between these releases.

10 comments

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  1. Andy Piper • December 12, 2008

    Hmm – now I’m trying to remember how long it was since I did the upgrade… I think I followed Popey’s instructions (or AndySC’s, or someone…) and it worked, but maybe it was that long ago now. I went through multi-step upgrades to 8.10 and it seems fine, although I’m kind of wondering whether I should have rebuilt myself an Ubuntu Server on 8.10 instead of sticking with Xubuntu and stripping stuff out later.

  2. Gareth Jones • December 12, 2008

    I upgraded using the normal process straight from Feisty (apt-get dist-upgrade). Had to do it separately for each new version all the way up to 8.10 but I didn’t have to get the CD or doing anything else different from normal. I did do it from the command line so that might have made a difference?

  3. nick • December 12, 2008

    @Gareth – when did you upgrade? Although Feisty went out of support in October, I don’t know when exactly the repositories became unavailable.

  4. Chris Dalby • December 13, 2008

    thanks for the post Nick. My MPC-L arrived this week too and I spent a couple of hours failing to install or update from the repository. This post answered all of the questions I had, Now to try the upgrade ;)

  5. Scott Clee • January 20, 2009

    These instructions worked perfectly. Thanks for taking the time to write it up (and for using a search friendly title!).

  6. Andy S-C • January 21, 2009

    You can also do the upgrade from no-longer-supported versions using the “old-release” repositories…

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GutsyUpgrades

    You point /etc/apt/sources.list at the “old-release” repository for feisty per the instructions given, and then do the upgrade.. and it works!

  7. Andy S-C • January 21, 2009

    trackback link from http://stanford-clark.com/viglen.html

  8. John Meredith • February 14, 2009

    Thanks for your information. I wanted to get openssh-server and x11vnc running on my MPC-L but couldnt update anything on Feisty! Upgraded successfully, thanks!

  9. Damian • April 5, 2009

    I’ve posted on our blog about installing Ubuntu (8.04, not xubuntu) onto an MPC-L. Runs very slowly, but is an interesting experiment none the less. The video drivers caused the biggest difficulties…
    http://blog.jaytag.co.uk/index.php/archives/176

  10. pingback from Viglen MPC-L Useful Commands and Tips | Chris Dalby Untangles Networks • October 27, 2009

    [...] to download the right distro and upgrade in the right way.  I followed the excellent blog post by Nicholas O’Leary and Andy Stanford-Clark’s Hints and Tips for Ubunu on a Viglen.  Both these posts saved me a [...]

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