Upgrading to Edgy
When (K)ubuntu 6.10 ('Edgy Eft') came out, there were a number of problems reported with the upgrade process. Being fairly busy at the time, I decided to wait.
So, a few days ago I decided to give it a try. Everything went smoothly, except that my monitor ended up misconfigured. I don't blame the upgrade process, however -- instead I blame my crappy attempt at earlier attempting configuration of X for multiple monitors.
One thing to note is that Edgy uses a replacement for the init process called Upstart. Because this replaces init, you require two instances of
apt-get dist-upgrade
instead of one.
So far (beyond the monitor configuration issue, which I fixed with but a bit of fiddling) everything runs beautifully. While not as 'Edgy' as originally intended, it's a tremendous improvement -- the new version of KDE runs much faster than was previous, and many applications run better. Even the VMWare player software behaves better, though I suspect that has something to do with me discovering that on linux, the VMWare player automatically nices itself to a priority of -15 or so, causing performance issues when a virtual machine is under heavy load.
Comments
You got lucky, they (Ubuntu) specifically recommend not doing it that way.
Last I heard, they were still recommending a clean install instead of an upgrade... but the Ubuntu website has this to say on the subject of upgrades
True, I'd heard about the 'clean install' school of thought, but I would have preferred not to go through all the hassle of a clean install. Had the upgrade failed, however, I would have ended up doing one, most likely.
What one of my profs does is have his home directory symbolically link to a different partition. That way he can reinstall or whatever and then just relink his home directory to get all his settings and data hooked back in.
He has various linux tips on his website, particularly wrt music stuff.
http://geocities.com/ecormier23/index-4.html
Not everthing that makes a workstation is in a user's home directory. In this case, I'd had several custom programs installed, and recompiling them (and relinking,etc) was something I wasn't ready to confront.
Keeping home directories separate is a good idea though. In true unix fashion there are a number of ways to do that -- symlinks, keeping /home on a separate partition, etc.
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