Upgrading from Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx...

Now that Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is out, I am sure most users will want to upgrade their Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) to the new and improved. My advise to new users or those unfamiliar with the terminal bash shell to wait for other more experienced users to upgrade and see if they encounter any problems. If they have a similar setup or hardware as you have, then read or wait till the problem is solved. You can quickly check how by using Google and doing a query like this.

For the power users and those familiar with the workings of Ubuntu, you most probably also use a lot of PPAs (Personal Package Archives) either from Launchpad or some other repository. In case you didn't know, upgrading your Karmic to Lucid will result in:

1. The upgrade will disable all non-Ubuntu repositories from your source.list file or source.list.d folder.
   
2. The applications/packages that you have already installed may not work correctly, break, and/or damage your setup after the upgrade due to architecture differences or dependencies.

The easiest way for a Karmic user to ensure that their upgrade to Lynx is successful, is to first make a backup copy of their source.list file and sources.list.d folder. Then remove all software installed by the PPA and reinstall the same software from the Ubuntu repositories.

This used to be quite a laborious task as this was usually done manually. Now, you can use a program called ppa-purge which you can get for Karmic only here. Once you have installed this, simply type:

ppa-purge ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

Replace "ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa" with the PPAs that you use. This will remove the installed applications from the said repository, remove the repository reference from Ubuntu and then reinstall the official supported version of the same application from Ubuntu's repository.

Once you have cleaned up all your PPAs, you can safely upgrade to Lucid Lynx. Once there, you can simply enable your favorite PPAs from your source.list and source.list.d folder and replace the keyword karmic with lucid. Before doing so, I strongly suggest you visit each developer's PPA page to see if they have a better version of the same software that the Ubuntu repositories has before upgrading to the PPA version.

I am not giving detailed steps for this post as this post is meant for power users who should know what I am talking about.