Hi Paul.
a) I can't speak with any experience on this, but I think the upgrade should work fine. The main thing to do is to test first in a development environment with a copy of your database. Others with more experience will hopefully comment on any gotchas updating from that version. There are also many improvements and enhancements since 3.8.24, so you will probably need to spend time seeing what is new/changes. With reports you will most likely need to test these to make sure they work as expected, as database changes may affect them.
b) Either Debian and Ubuntu LTS should work fine. The latest Ubuntu LTS (18.04) is good as far as I'm aware. With Debian 10 (Buster) I think there are a couple of packaging issues still to resolve.
c) A packaged install is the recommended way to install Koha these days. It also makes updates for security and maintenance releases much easier. Rather than having to use CPAN to manually install all the right versions of Perl modules, the packaging takes care of it all (and there are a lot of Perl modules that Koha uses). While it is possible, I think you are in for a great deal of effort and pain if you install from a tarball.
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_ubuntu_-_packages
Hopefully others who are familiar with updating from older versions can offer some specific advice from their experiences.
David Nind |
david.nind@gmail.comPO Box 12367, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand 6144
m. +64 21 0537 847