[TriLUG] Updating Ubuntu

[Kevin Hunter]

At 10:51a -0400 on Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Carl Crider wrote:
>  My updates through the "7 series" had a couple of hiccups with drivers. The
> last jump from
> 7 to 8 on my laptop worked out just fine. I do a backup of everything before
> any of these updates though ... better safe than sorry. IMO, If I was going
> from 6.10, I'd do a backup and use a fresh installation.

Second that on the "7 series".  Also, as 6.10 to 7.04 took me close to
13 hours doing the in-place upgrade, I've since been just backing up my
/home dirs and doing a fresh install.  This means I have to reinstall
certain applications again, but this also is a good way of clearing out
the stuff I no longer need but installed for one-off gigs.  If I need
it, it's easy to sudo apt-get install, or to trawl through synaptic.

Caution that this way means you also lose any modifications you made in
/etc, or anything else you installed not in /home.  (Like removing the
pcspkr kernel module from loading!)

Olson also brings up a good point about third party apps.

Kevin