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.