Ubuntu Dapper Drake is a great operating system for new computer users, but it’s starting to show its age. Ubuntu Edgy Eft is a newer release of Ubuntu that offers a number of improvements over Dapper Drake. If you’re looking to upgrade your Ubuntu installation from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, there are a few steps you need to take. First, you’ll need to install the Ubuntu Update Manager (UPM) package. UPM allows you to keep your system up-to-date with the latest security and software updates. Once UPM is installed, open it and click on the “Updates” tab. In the “Available Updates” list, click on the “Install Updates” button. This will start the installation process for all of the available updates for Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Once all of the updates have been installed, restart your computer so that the changes can take effect. Once your computer has restarted, open a terminal window and type in apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y . This will update your system with all of the latest changes from both the repositories and UPM. If you’re upgrading from an older version of Ubuntu such as Dapper Drake or Hardy Heron, some additional steps may be required before you can upgrade to Edgy Eft. For example, if you’re using GNOME desktop environment, you’ll need to install some additional packages before upgrading your system. You can find more information about upgrading your system in our guide titled “How To Upgrade Your Ubuntu System.” ..

Please note – this method is much less reliable. If you use this method, you MUST be prepared to fix problems manually, such as packages being unexpectedly removed. Using Update Manager is likely to be much less problematic.

Before you read this HowTo, you may want to consider installing using the GUI with Update Manager, which is probably a simpler method for regular users.

If you are a power user, then let’s move on. First, we’ll need to install ubuntu-desktop if it’s not already installed because otherwise there will be a dependencies problem.

Now we’ll need to run a command that will change all the occurrences of dapper to edgy in our sources.list file. If you aren’t familiar, sources.list is the file that points to your list of possible upgrades and packages. For windows users, you can think of it as the file that points to Windows Update. Of course, if you are a windows user, you should really install with the Update Manager utility linked above.

Now we’ll perform the actual upgrades:

The && part of the command means that the second command will run after the first as long as the first command completes successfully.

Now we’ll finish up the upgrade with a few more commands:

Note that the –configure is actually two dashes. For some reason WordPress makes it look like a single dash. Reboot, and you are all done!

sudo dpkg –configure -a

Note: I’ve seen some notes that this upgrade doesn’t work very well for people running Ubuntu as a Guest in VMWare with VMWare tools installed. I tested it out and came to the same conclusion, no fix as of yet.

Update:

If upgrading gives you the error message “failed to load module GLcore”, you will want to run these commands. Thanks for this tip to Biogeek in the comments below.