Livin' the life...

Well, I did say, "by Saturday" ! What can I say..? So far, so good! The Ubuntu upgrade process from 6.10 ("Edgy Eft") to 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn") seems to have gone extremely smoothly. Before I ramble a bit on that though, I'll walk you through what I did in the event that any of you are upgrading.

To upgrade, you're given two main options: "Network upgrade" (i.e. online) or "Alternate installation CD" (i.e. offline). Keeping in mind that this is only Day 2 of this OS version being available and thus, the amount of people that will be downloading it or doing online upgrades (these guys commenting for e.g.), I thought best (for safety and speed) to do the offline install. To do this install you'll have to browse here and grab the Alternate install CD iso (~696mbs). Once you've downloaded this file, burn it (remembering to burn disk image and not a normal data burn - more info) and with Ubuntu 6.10 running, insert the CD and follow the instructions that pop-up on-screen.

Mostly the entire thing is smooth from then on.. The only two things I didn't get were: (1) at times.. this "offline upgrade" seemed as if it was going online for some of the packages.. and (2) someways into the install, a message popped up asking me if to keep or replace my login.defs file. For this, I quickly googled "login.defs" and didn't find any real issue with replacement (as I never edited it) so, I allowed the Replace. These were really the only two prompts I had so that's a definite (y)!

Once that was complete, time for a quick reboot and login (yep, that's right, I didn't have to set up new users or anything) and *taadaa*, I'm on to Feisty! And since it was an upgrade, all my proggies are still there.. my email client is still setup; when I opened Firefox, it opened all the tabs I had from 'last time'; my gaim details (btw gaim seems to be upgraded); xchat details; all still there! (To be honest, I doubt an uninformed casual user would recognise the upgrade as none of the desktop or panels have been changed...)

So.. in a nutshell, that's it! The only thing that worries me slightly is that pc people always say that a clean install is always the better choice.. but in reality, with this stuff coming out every 6 months (unlike Windows for e.g. which comes out every ~3 years), I think it's a bit impractical to clean install, so I really hope upgrading has no gotchas.