Friday 28 June 2019

Updating Ubuntu - remember to update AND upgrade

I'm putting this here to remind me ... as I'm old and often forget ...... wassat ?

So I've been doing lots of stuff with Ubuntu recently, including containers, Virtual Servers AND Virtual Machines ...

And I remember to run: -

sudo apt-get update

but then wonder why my packages don't get ... updated !

It's simple ... I've run the update which effectively refreshes the list of packages available .... but NOT remembered to run the corollary upgrade process: -

sudo apt-get upgrade -y

which actually performs the update ( or, if you will, upgrade to the updated packages )

I can concatenate this: -

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

which does the job nicely.

If it helps, the auto-complete behaviour of most shells does help ....

Type sudo apt-get and then press the [TAB] key ...

sudo apt-get 

autoclean        build-dep        check            dist-upgrade     dselect-upgrade  purge            source           upgrade          
autoremove       changelog        clean            download         install          remove           update           


If I'm feeling really brave, I'll do this: -

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

which upgrades the underlying Ubuntu distribution ....

But that's for the brave ! YMMV

2 comments:

Mitch Cohen said...

I do this regularly on my ubuntu machine, unfortunately the last time left it in a state where it would boot to the purple screen and hang. After much googling I had to boot to a live CD edit /etc/gdm3/custom.conf and add WaylandEnable=false to the config

That was an adventure

Dave Hay said...

Oh, good grief, Charlie Brown, that's a PITA :-(

Thanks for the feedback though, Mitch, I suspect that'll help someone somewhere someday ( myself included )

Hope all is well, way too long since last we corresponded :-(

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Why did I not know that I can merely hit [cmd] [p]  to bring up a search box allowing me to search my project e.g. a repo cloned from GitHub...