It is possible to upgrade to 12.10 from 12.04 without breaking your settings, so long as you do not do a clean installation.
You can either upgrade using the upgrade manager or the command line, or you can manually upgrade by changing your sources to point to quantal instead of precise, and then manually upgrading the packages.
You can try to upgrade several important packages (gtk, glib, etc.) from the ricotz/testing ppa, then compile Nautilus 3.6 from source.
NOTE: Due to you are going to upgrade several important packages of your system, I strongly recommend to do this in a Virtual Machine or in a Test Machine only for testing purposes to see is everything is OK.
Make sure you have enable the "Source code repository"
In the Menu Bar choose Edit -> Software Sources. Click to enable "Source code repository".
Just in case I use the "Main Server" to Download.
Then..
1) Open a Terminal and install the following packages.
sudo apt-get install build-essential libtracker-sparql-0.14-dev wget
2) Install build dependencies.
sudo apt-get build-dep nautilus
3) Add ricotz ppa and upgrade the system.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/testing
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
4) Trash-Full icon in nautilus-places.
Nautilus 3.6.3 use the following icon for the trash-full (user-trash-full-symbolic.svg), not present by default in Ubuntu 12.04.
You can grab the icon from Ubuntu 13.04 to put it in /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/status/ directory.
To avoid this:
Once you have the correct icon type in the Terminal.
sudo mv /path/to/trash/image/user-trash-full-symbolic.svg /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/status/sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/status/user-trash-full-symbolic.svgsudo gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/gnome/
To look like this:
5) Create a folder to download the source code.
mkdir ~/Downloads/src
cd ~/Downloads/src
6) Download the nautilus 3.6.3 (raring) source code from Launchpad.
wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/raring/+source/nautilus/1:3.6.3-0ubuntu16/+files/nautilus_3.6.3.orig.tar.xz
7) Extract the source code.
tar -xvf nautilus_3.6.3.orig.tar.xz
8) Basic steps to compile & install. (You can change the steps according to your needs, add prefix etc.).
cd nautilus-3.6.3/
./configure
make
sudo make install
9) Kill nautilus.
10) Just in case... set default prefereces like show-desktop-icons, no show trash-icon in desktop, etc.
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.desktop trash-icon-visible false
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.desktop home-icon-visible false
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true
11) Finally reboot the system to see the changes.
Result:
Hope this helps.
Best Answer
Gedit 3.6.3does not exist. You'll have to choose3.6.2or3.8.3. Since3.8is a major version, I recommend to install the3.6.2.You should be able to build your package using these commands:
You have to know that it is not recommended to upgrade your packages, because it may change a lot of packages in your system, possibly breaking it.
You also have to take a close look at the depedencies that Gedit 3.6.2 needs.