This weekend I spend some time upgrading my home server from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Jaunty Jackalope. This was not a straightforward upgrade because some of the release between these version are not available on the Debian archive server and has to be pulled from the “old-releases.ubuntu.com”.

I used the documentation for the EOLUpgrade procedure to go from Feisty to Gutsy, to Hardy, to Intrepid and finally to Jaunty Jackalope. I had to manually hack the Upgrade DistUpgradeControler for the “do-release-upgrade” command in Feisty. These commands were based on this forum post.


wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz.gpg

tar xf gutsy.tar.gz
gutsy "./dist-upgrade.py --frontend=DistUpgradeViewGtk"


From their on it went quite smooth and after some reboots and various “do-release-upgrades” Jaunty Jackalope was running on my system.

Some gotchas: Upgrade from 8.04 (LTS) to 8.10 (Intrepid) needs some attention to step away from the LTS version. See this article especially the section with “Edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set:”

Prompt=normal


Exim4 had some issues because the DEBCONF variables are deprecated and do not work anymore. Read the document available in /usr/share/doc/exim4-config/NEWS.Debian.gz

Netatalk was a different issue. After upgrading, I could not logon from my Macbook Pro to my AFP shares (including the timemachine backup). It seems that this has to do with password encryption not supported in the current build due to some licensing issues.

I followed these instructions to create my own Ubuntu/Debian package for Netatalk. During compilation I ran into the problem that my headers files for the Berkeley DB did not match the library

checking Berkeley DB library version >= 4.1.0... header/library version mismatch (4.7.25/4.4.20), no

This is a strange problem, because both versions were installed. I patched the “configure” file to fix this. Search for the following line in “configure”

{ echo "$as_me:$LINENO: checking for Berkeley DB link (-ldb-4.2)" >&5

Replace all four “-4.2″ instances with “-4.7″ and rerun following command

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl sudo dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc


Note: If you already had an older version of Netatalk running, it could be that the .AppleDB files in your shares on the server are of an older version; you probably have to trash the .AppleDB files, otherwise you get an error when MacOS X tries to connect to the share.

After these exercises, I have Jaunty Jackalope running on my Sun Ultra 20. This version supports the sensors that are in the system; so with the warm weather, it does not turn on the fans as high as it did before in Feisty (without the sensor support).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.