Ubuntu Upgrade
I spent a good part of the weekend upgrading my work laptop from Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10) to Edgy Eft (6.10). Like with most operating system upgrades, I chose to backup my important stuff, format the drive, and do a clean install.
Everything went well, and I got all of my applications reinstalled and reconfigured. There were a few hiccups here and there, but it was much easier than upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP (which I’ve done a few times.) The main problem that I had was that I forgot to backup my VPN settings for work. Fortunately, Shinto came to my rescue with a document that he had written ages ago. He emailed it to me, and it got me going in a matter of minutes.
I also discovered a few new things about starting/stopping networks under Ubuntu (like the use of /etc/network/if-up.d/ and /etc/network/if-down.d) that made getting my VPN up in a reliable way. It took some tinkering with my scripts, but I managed to get everything working smoothly.
The interface for Edgy is much faster than it was under Breezy. Windows alt-tab faster, scroll faster, update quicker, and are generally more crisp. I’m quite happy with the way things are working now. My sound card (which required some tinkering under Breezy) worked out of the box with Edgy. That made me very happy since I couldn’t recall exactly what I did to get it working before, and I didn’t want to spend the time to re-research it.
One of the main reasons that I upgraded was so that I could try out a new window manager called Beryl that Shinto highly recommended. This was a total failure. I got it installed, but when I would boot and log in, the window manager would not launch. I’m not quite sure why, and it was in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday morning/Saturday night, so I uninstalled it and gave up. I’ll have at it again later, but I emailed Shinto first to see what process he used for getting it installed. I’m going to see what he says before I give it another shot.
Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results of upgrading my laptop to a more recent version of Linux.
