I decided to do an online distro upgrade to Ubuntu feisty. As with my last online distro upgrade attempt (Dapper to Edgy), this one didn't go well either. Apache2 wouldn't upgrade cleanly, so I just removed all of apache2. I planned to install it from scratch when the distro upgrade was done.
Unfortunately, there was a problem with removing or upgrading the kernel and I went nuts and decided to completely throw away the Edgy kernel and give Feisty the change to install a few of its kernels. That was a mistake since Ubuntu likes grub and I prefer lilo. Something went wrong the kernel upgrade and I was left with a system that died with kernel panic when trying to mount the root filesystem.
A bit of work with a Dapper installer, and Edgy alternative installer, and a Mandriva 2006 installer gave me no joy. My old trick of chroot to the old mounted root and then mounting the other filesystems didn't work (so I couldn't get /boot to mount, nor could I lilo to write the MBR). There may be a way to do all of that, but I don't know what it is.
Finally I broke down, backed up my /etc and installed Feisty from a CD I'd previously made but not used (since I wanted to just update everything in place). I've spent a few hours downloading the other packages I need (postgresql, subversion, g++, apache2, a whole bunch of php, java, openvpn etc) and by morning I'll have a usable system.
I always have my /home on a partition separate from /. Occasions like this remind me of the wisdom of making that choice.
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