[TriLUG] pilot has been upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[Aaron Schrab]

At 17:17 -0400 20 Apr 2013, Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:
>[1] It took a long time to download all of the new .deb package files 
>after we started the upgrade.  That got me wondering... is there a way 
>I could've pre-loaded all of the new .deb files before the upgrade, and 
>then just pulled the trigger today?  If you've done this, let me know.

There's the --download-only, or -d option to apt-get.  That would 
require that sources.list be modified before starting to download, but 
that shouldn't be a big problem if done only a few hours or so before 
planning to actually do the upgrade.

If wanting to go longer, it would likely be possible to add the new 
distribution to sources.list while leaving the old one in as well.  Then 
/etc/apt/preferences could be used to indicate that packages from the 
new distribution shouldn't be pulled in automatically by other uses of 
apt-get, and use the --target-release option for the download command.

I haven't actually tried those things together, but I have used each of 
the parts separately.