Upgrading Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 14.04 with Mate desktop

We shall upgrade Ubuntu 10.04 with Gnome 2 desktop to 14.04 (also an LTS or Long Term Support release), but the 14.04 will use the Mate desktop, which looks like the traditional Gnome 2 (since Mate is a fork of Gnome 2) instead of the Unity desktop.

The command "do-release-upgrade" will be the method, with some PPAs (Personal Package Archives) 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 is via ssh through a VPN which auto-connects back to this host.

We will test this in a VM under KVM.

Read Part 1 to get started.