[mythtv-users] Upgrade path for Mythbuntu 14.04?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 22 Dec 2016 17:54:34 -0600, you wrote:

>It took me so long to get to where I could update my ancient system that I
>never had a previous opportunity to upgrade-in-place with a Mythbuntu
>package.
>
>Today I started looking at the Mythbuntu website to see how to get onto the
>current 16.04 LTE based version with MythTV 0.28.
>
>About the only two things I got that I'm sure of is that I need to run the
>Software Updater application and get everything up to date and then get a
>full system back up before I do a system update.
>
>After that, it gets pretty fuzzy.  Do I need to update through 14.10,
>15.04, ... or can I go directly from 14.04 to 16.04?
>
>Since Mythbuntu as a separate distro is going away, do I need to upgrade to
>something like Xubuntu or Kubuntu and then simply update/upgrade the MythTV
>package(s) from the upgraded system's package manager?  Do I need to
>reverse the order and update/upgrade MythTV first, before upgrading the OS?
>
>It sounds like I will need to do something like that the next time (e.g.
>18.04 LTE), true?
>
>Do I need to go back to my past (painful) process of building a clean
>install on a separate disk and reload my Myth database after I get MythTV
>installed plus any other tweaks (like udev or sudo rules)?
>
>Any advice would be appreciated.

You can upgrade directly from any LTS version to the next LTS version.
You usually have to wait for the .1 release before this works though.
So you can directly upgrade from 14.04.x to 16.04.1.  I prefer to do
it using the command line: do-release-upgrade.

Personally, I prefer to run two bootable partitions so I can run any
new system in parallel with the old one until I have the new one
working properly.  But doing a full backup before upgrading also
works.  I use Clonezilla for full backups.

Mythbuntu still exists as a 16.04.1 distribution, so it is best to use
that and upgrade to it.  Worry about the problem of Mythbuntu going
away next time around.

Before you do the OS upgrade though, do the MythTV upgrade to 0.28 on
14.04.  You really do not want to be doing both upgrades at once and
0.28 is good on 14.04.

Do you use external frontends or network tuners?  Are any of your
internal tuners slow to start up (eg slow loading firmware)?  If so,
then the default systemd settings for mythbackend in 16.04.1 will not
work and you will need to override them.  I worked out how to do this,
and Jim Abernathy has put it in his install guide available here:

http://mythtvinstall.blogspot.co.nz/2016/12/how-to-install-mythbuntu-16041.html

I think it is also available from the MythTV Wiki now.