For this project, the goal is to update a remote Ubuntu 10.04 system running good ol' Gnome 2.x (of course) to Ubuntu 14.04 with Mate desktop (a fork of Gnome 2.x) instead of Unity.

The command "do-release-upgrade" will be the method, with some PPAs added at the end to bring in the Mate desktop on to the system.

A slight complication is that there are limitations on the free space on the root partition.

Further more, the host is about 5,000 km away and owned by someone without technical experience or much sysadmin ability to fix anything that goes wrong.

All access on the eventual target will be via ssh through a VPN which auto-connects back to this host, so we'll do this work via ssh to the VM.

We will test this in a VM under KVM.

Our kernel to start with is:

And our free space situation on relevant drives is thus:

So, let us first create a VM with a fresh Ubuntu 10.04, 32-bit version:

Oh dear, no graphical interface opened. Because running as root? Not seen this before.

However, our new Ubuntu VM is running:

And using virt-manager, we see our Ubuntu VM has booted and is ready to begin installing:

The installation process completed; strictly a default setup with separate / and /home partitions and openssh-server for remote access from the host machine.

We're ready to begin the testing.

First thing, one will notice under the "Avail" column that the VM has more free disk space on / than the real target computer:

... by quite a bit. So, I will consume some of it with a Very Large File:

That should work for our purposes -- testing complexity of process and if target computer has sufficient space.

In a terminal window connected via ssh (for easier copying & pasting, plus the terminal has 4 tabs already being used, so less window switching):

And... meet you back here in an hour or so - it's a slow process.

While you were gone, this informational prompt came up, I'll show you what it said so there will be no surprises (and to show off to Windows users the type of help one can expect from the system as opposed to "Error 43927489XKQ8B: Things is b0rked, good luck" that they're sadly used to):

Well, it's "tomorrow" now. I've been waiting for the computer, it's been waiting for me. I got to sleep, it's kept busy 24/7.

But we're getting close. I've taken a couple screen captures of libc6 and grub config screens and now it's asking this:

The process continues...

The process finishes:

Done:

Oddly, in the desktop screenshot below, it appears at first glance that the system is running 14.04 already. This is not correct however - it's prompting us to upgrade to 14.04 Trusty Tahr.

Finally, here's the free space post do-release-upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 - it appears unchanged!

This article has gotten longer than I anticipated, so the next do-release-upgrade will be a separate page.

In the first part of this guide, we upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 12.04 in a KVM virtual machine (VM).

There were 4.6 GB free space on / (root) partition when we started, and after do-release-upgrade had finished, we had:

So, 2.9 GB free. Since running out of space would be less than desirable, we'll free some from apt's cache:

Now we have 3.4 GB free space - that should be acceptable. LibreOffice could be uninstalled prior to running another do-release-upgrade if there's a concern about requiring more space still, but I don't think it's necessary - so let's risk proceding as is.

Once again, we're doing this through SSH because the eventual "production" target is best accessed that way, because it's more convenient, because that's how remote machines are administered.

If you're doing this at home, you won't need SSH.

Regardless, the process asks another question:

Supper and beverage time while things proceed...

Approximately 3 hours later we're prompted with this:

And... a few minutes later, it seems we're up to Ubuntu 14.04:

After the system reboots:

Yay, the upgrade was successful. Except now we have Unity as a desktop. And our free disk space is not good, with 1.3 GB free:

Better: 2.2 GB free space is acceptable considering we started with 4.5 GB and haven't cleaned out anything unneeded.

In the next step, we'll finally install Mate desktop.

Our upgrade process is almost complete - the time-consuming steps of running do-release-upgrade twice was performed in previous steps (Step 1 and Step 2.

For this final step, we install the Mate desktop to replace Unity.

First things first: this test is running in a virtual machine (VM) instead of on real hardware. And advantage is that we can take a snapshot of the state of the VM so that if things go wrong, we can revert.

Okay, snapshot / backup made, here's what we're starting with:

Ready to start. The Mate Desktop Wiki is our guide - they probably explain things better than I do. And a giant thank-you to Martin Wimpress for his development work and his guest spots on the following podcasts: Linux Luddites, MintCast, LAS Unplugged.

Let's add the repositories (repos) with the following two commands:

One done, one to go:

We've already done that command recommended in the last line above!

Again, we've already run the first command, and we're running that second command right now. (Odd that the output of a command is to... run that command. Huh.)

To continue with the output of the last command:

As per the advice above, an update of the repo cache and an upgrade of the software is recommended next; we'll do that momentarily with sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get upgrade.

Finally, do we want a vanilla Mate desktop, or an Ubuntu-branded one?

From the Mate Wiki again:

Ubuntu MATE is a more comprehensive option that offers a slightly tweaked layout, configuration, and themes to integrate into Ubuntu in a more seamless fashion. This will install the complete MATE Desktop Environment as well as LightDM and numerous other applications to provide a full and well rounded desktop.

The output from the last command above gives instruction to install the Ubuntu version via sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-mate-desktop.

I think it best to choose the Ubuntu Mate version as recommended.

Once it's been screen-shot-captured, perhaps I'll roll-back the VM snapshot and install the Vanilla Version to screen shot it too, for comparison.

So, per last output pasted above, as always, running as root (saves us tying "sudo" a bunch of times, and providing passwords frequently) :

Uh-oh, looks like running via SSH caused a minor problem, but I doubt it's a game-stopper.

That took a rather long time, but at the end:

We can clean some stuff up:

Really, we want to clean out Unity to save a bunch of space.

After a restart:

But there's more Unity cruft sitting around, so try to get rid of all of it:

I cut the packaage list out from above (all 96 of them).

Rebooting brought up a warning about corrupted graphics:

I chose to run in reduced graphics mode and got the nice Mate login screen:

Below is our new, lovely Mate desktop on Ubuntu 14.04