Ubuntu 21.04 beta is upgradable to official release?



Yeah, you'll need to do a fresh install - or you'll want to. You can't just install the beta and then keep upgrading and upgrading to get the official release. It might work, but I'd not recommend it.

That'd make the testing so much easier. As it stands, I use rsync to grab the daily image, check the manifests, and then start with the new daily image.

By all means, please install it and look for bugs - just don't get to set in your ways and be prepared to update to the full version later this month. It's only like 20 minutes to do a complete installation, so it's not a huge investment in time.
 
Yeah, you'll need to do a fresh install - or you'll want to. You can't just install the beta and then keep upgrading and upgrading to get the official release. It might work, but I'd not recommend it.

That'd make the testing so much easier. As it stands, I use rsync to grab the daily image, check the manifests, and then start with the new daily image.

By all means, please install it and look for bugs - just don't get to set in your ways and be prepared to update to the full version later this month. It's only like 20 minutes to do a complete installation, so it's not a huge investment in time.
Awesome, rsync sounds interesting. Thank you!
 
Where are you pulling the daily beta builds?


(This is also where you'd fill in your test information.)

There's the appropriate daily command (it changes) in the download info - like this is the one for Lubuntu:


Once you've done it enough, you can skip that - it just increments daily. So, tomorrow it'll be:

Code:
zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/daily-live/20210406/hirsute-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync

I simply changed the 5 to a 6 to mark the next day of the month. It goes up like that every day - though there are sometimes point releases in a single day.

The manifest changes daily. I grab it with wget - like so:

Code:
wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/daily-live/current/hirsute-desktop-amd64.manifest

Once you have the first one, you can wget on the following day. At that point you can run a 'diff' against them. I just delete the old one and run the diff against the most recent two manifests. It looks like this:

Code:
diff hirsute-desktop-amd64.manifest.1 hirsute-desktop-amd64.manifest

Doing that will tell you what software has changed between the daily images - meaning you can make a more informed choice about where you spend your time looking for new bugs.

Bugs get filed on Launchpad, and will require an account to do so.
 
Oh, and there's also rsync as an option. It operates just like the zsync. I use zsync out of habit but it's effectively the same as rsync. I think they prefer that folks use the rsync, but I forget why.
 
G'day @rgbellotti , we haven't met before now, but a belated welcome to linux.org :)

Agree with all the above.

If you want to use the Beta, customise your settings &c and NOT have to start from scratch when the official release comes out, you might consider the following approach.

Distro Developers have what is described as a feature freeze before the official release, typically about 2 - 3 weeks before the release. From that time, no more enhancements or apps are added, and only bugs are still worked on.

If you are running updates, tweaking desktop settings and so on, you could continue up until that time and then save/copy your Home folder/partition. When you install the "new" release, you can use the saved folder as your Home and there should be no compatibility issues.

There will likely be some updates to be run with the new release, as software developers for the apps roll out new features during the freeze.

The above could be a hit and miss approach, and I have not tried it myself, so better might be just to not get too attached to your settings and do the complete install with the new.

Just food for thought.

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
Sounds good, everyone, and thank you again for the help and advice. I don't mind doing a fresh install so much, probably best to be safe, mainly I was wondering if I needed to plan accordingly. I'll be trying out the beta of Ubuntu Studio (currently using the 20.04 LTS version of Ubuntu Studio on this laptop).
 
If you get into it, it'd be worth joining the Ubuntu Studio folks in chat, just to keep up with anything that is going on and to let them know you're helping. It's a lot of fun.

I do pretty much every Lubuntu live test that gets done. You can multitask during it, so it's not too hard and not too time consuming. The toughest parts are being meticulous and filing out good bug reports.
 
That's good to know I'll sign up for the Ubuntu Studio chat soon then. For the moment I keep getting an install error, keeps getting stuck at the same place during the install (Processing Contextual job @ 78% completion) and then gives me a timeout error. I tried updating and upgrading first before running the install (wasn't sure if that would do anything but gave it a try the third attempt). The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 15-7559 with an Intel i7 processor and nvidia geforce graphics, 16G ram. I'll read around and look for alternative methods or try to figure out why it keeps hanging in that same step
 

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Couldn't figure out how to keep it from stalling at that same point, so I opted for the beta Kubuntu version instead and will just manually install the media programs for now. Very nice looking OS
 
Judging by the lack of completed test cases according to here, that seems like a good distro to test. Thanks for helping!
 
If you are thinking of running a Beta release of a distribution because you want more bleeding edge software you might as well think of switching to a rolling release distribution.
 

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