I took the jump from Dapper (6.06) to Edgy (6.10) with quite a flawless upgrade initiated by:
$ gksu "update-manager -c"Had to comment out the PLF repositories before I could do the upgrade.
## PLF REPOSITORY
# deb http://packages.freecontrib.org/ubuntu/plf dapper free non-free
# deb-src http://packages.freecontrib.org/ubuntu/plf dapper free non-freeThe first thing I did after the upgrade was to enable the universe and multiverse repositories via Synaptics and run an upgrade and autoclean via aptitude to clean out any unused and downloaded packages:
$ sudo aptitude upgrade
$ sudo aptitude autocleanAlso noticed that the default shell had been changed to dash instead of the familiar bash on linux distros, so I removed the symbolic link for "/bin/sh" from dash to bash:
$ sudo rm -rf /bin/sh
$ sudo ln -s /bin/bash /bin/shThe default video driver didn't quite work too well with my nvidia card and so installed nvidia-glx and enabled it.
$ sudo aptitude install nvidia-glx
$ sudo nvidia-glx-config enable
$ sudo nvidia-xconfigWith the nvidia glx driver and the new kernel installed, I edited "/etc/grub/grub.conf" to point to the new kernel:
title Ubuntu Edgy 386
root (hd0,2)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-386 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg00-lv00
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.17-10-386Gave the system a reboot and everything seemed to be back to normal... but not until I opened up firefox and noticed the font rendering was blurred and ugly, unlike the crisp fonts on other application. Checked on some of the bug reports at launchpad.net and indeed found a fix there. The fix mentioned was to create a ".font.conf" file with the below contents in the home directory:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
<const>hintfull</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>Tomboy -- a wiki for the desktop had been made available by default with Edgy but did not show up anywhere in the Applications list so added it to the top panel from the list of Accessories available.
Last but not the least my boot time is now about 12 seconds on a 1.75Ghz cpu laptop with 1Gig of memory... all due to the new init system, upstart which is now the default.
Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 upgrade
Recently upgraded from Edgy to Feisty:
X failed to start complaining about nvidia module not being found.
Replaced "nvidia" with "nv" in "/etc/X11/xorg.conf".
Installed the "ubuntu-restricted-extras" for commonly used applications such as java and flash.Ran `startx`.
Installed the "linux-restricted-modules" for the current kernel version in use.
Then enabled the "nvidia" driver at "System > Administration > Restricted Drivers Manager".
Desktop Effects is now built in with Feisty, and seems to perform better... was a pain to get it up and running in older versions.
Edgy Upgrade
I'm wondering if I should bother upgrading from Dapper to Edgy. Is it worth the trouble? OK, I'd get Firefox 2.0, but I downloaded that today, and frankly, except for the built-in spell-check, it doesn't seem that special. (My old fonts stayed around, for what it's worth.) Tomboy? I looked at it once when my college kid was looking at OneNote, but didn't find it worthwhile for me, I'd rather leave myself notes in Emacs.
So is there any compelling reason to jump from the LTS at the first opportunity?