Upgrading Ubuntu on EEEPC
December 28, 2009 Leave a comment
I have an old EEEPC running ubuntu 8.10. I spent a lot of time seeking for a method to perform in order to upgrade it to the current version of ubuntu, which is 9.10. The only problem that I found is I don’t have enough space to perform an upgrade. After spending a few hours researching, here is a list of steps that I’ve done:
1. Download ubuntu alternate iso images for 9.04 and 9.10
2. Find a thumbdrive, something like 1GB will work just fine
3. Copy the image to the thumbdrive, start with 9.04
4. Plug it into a netbook, in my case it’s a 4GB eeepc
5. Open a Terminal. If you can’t find it, it’s under Applications > Accessories > Terminal
6. Type:
sudo mount /path/to/file.iso /cdrom -o loop
In my case, it was: sudo mount /media/UNTITLED/ubuntu9-4.iso /cdrom -o loop
(If you noticed my laziness on the thumb drive name, it’s a yes, I don’t bother renaming my thumb drive after formatting)
7. Perform an upgrade with a little trick by running this command
sudo /cdrom/cdromupgrade
8. Follow the usual upgrade steps
9. Remove the “cdrom” from apt sources.list
sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
10. Repeat [3] for ubuntu 9.10
Ok, there is the explanation of what it does:
Since there is not enough space on my netbook, I decided to perform and upgrade based on CD. However, this funky netbook does not have a CD rom or DVD and I don’t want to spend a few bucks on an external DVD. Therefore, I mount the usb image as an actual CD rom on the system. Yes, it’s pretty neat 🙂 Then I go to my “virtual CD rom” and perform an upgrade.
