Ubuntu makes the Upgrade

I have done a few Ubuntu release upgrades in the house now, so I figured I’d comment a little bit about them and the new Ubuntu 8.04 in general…

The first upgrade was my laptop. This was an upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04 and everything went really smooth. Well, I should say it went smooth, but long. I did this upgrade on the friday afternoon after the initial release and, shall we say, the repositories were a little busy. This means that it took several hours to do the upgrade, although they were generally unattended hours. I just left the lappy alone and it did it’s thing and later on after a reboot, I was running 8.04. Not too bad!

The second upgrade was a bit different. Not in the respect that it was faster, because that was not the case at all. I upgraded one of my servers, my main server actually. This this was running 6.10, and the unfortunate part about that is that there is no direct upgrade path to 8.04 form there, so I had to upgrade to 7.10 (first). I did a lot of worrying about this one before pushing the go button because this server has run for a year without any issues whatsoever, and I really didn’t want to create any now. I run *all* my services on that old laptop 😉 I am happy to say, though, that other than taking too long for my wife (the internet is her drug of choice now), the upgrade was really nice and smooth. One reboot after downloading the packages and it was right back up and running doing what it was supposed to be doing. A note here for those of you who are going to perform a similar upgrade is to stick with your original application config filles. For example, if you run bind like I do and you upgrade bind, keep your old config file instead of replacing. All my old config files worked just fine with the new versions of my services (dhcp, bind, smb, etc). Now I am going to want to upgrade this again to get to 8.04, but maybe I’ll save that for sometime when I want to be more adventurous than late on a sunday afternoon.

Lastly, this weekend I upgraded my wife’s laptop. Hers is a nice new AMD64 that I bought her for Christmas. I had a bit of trouble with this one. I did the upgrade (64bit) which appeared to be working with no problems, until the reboot. For some reason, after the reboot I was presented with a half upgraded laptop with no networking and no X server. Now I *could* have fought with it a little bit to fix it, but decided to just call it there and to a fresh install. You see, whn I first did the install I used the 64 bit version of Ubuntu and found out later that that version is not quite as polished as the 32bit version. Since my wife uses this laptop it’s a lot easier on her just to have everything do what she wants, so I tok this opportunity to plug the 32bit i386 version in. The clean install was absolutely quick and painless right up until the point where I had to get the wireless working, but that’s because it’s a broadcom chipset and I knew that was coming. The rest was a breeze and in my opinion, much faster than any similar 7.10 or previous desktop install. I don’t know what you Ubuntu guys changed on the installer this time, but good job!

Over all, this release has been a pleasure to install and work with. Still, some couple weeks later, the repositories are slow. I assume they are still being hammered pretty hard. If you are still running an older version of Ubuntu, the upgrade is worth the wait from the slow repo’s. Check it out. You’ll like it!

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