Upgrade manually from 1.7.9 to 1.8 not working

Update 2 - found many other issues that were not previously disclosed. First I had to install ZMQContext. Here is a good script for Ubuntu, install zeromq in ubuntu 14.04 · GitHub just need to change the bash location. Then I had to enable php5-zmq. Then manually run the vendor/bin/xmr.phar to get xmr enabled. Then make sure that the rewrite module is enabled in Apache. Then change the /var/www config in the apache2.conf to allow for .htaccess rewrites. Then and only then could I get past the /install/2 404 not found error. The post below is what clued me in to look at the rewrite.