Monday, May 11, 2009

Upgrade Ubuntu Desktop from 8.10 to 9.04


Doing a distribution upgrade always makes me feel uncertain. I used to use another flavour of Linux that was very poor at upgrading. In fact, every time I tried to upgrade between versions it broke. I ended up doing a clean install every time there was a new version. Since switching to Ubuntu I have not had that problem, but I must be scarred from my previous experiences because I still get uneasy about upgrading. I have even waited to make sure that other people can do successful upgrades.

Ubuntu makes it dead simple to perform a distribution upgrade. All one really needs to do is to run update-manager. Generally this runs each time after you start up to check for upgrades but you may have disabled that. Once the program finds that there is a new distribution there is a button that can be pressed to perform a distribution upgrade. Even though the upgrade is seamless I suggest making a backup before you perform the upgrade. You should see some similar screens on your computer that I have posted here. You pretty much let it work and at the end it will want you to reboot.

If you have a successful reboot then the upgrade went fine. If you had some issues then you may want to check out the Ubuntu forums or try to google it.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

9.04 Ubuntu Netbook Remix

So I just got an Asus 1000HA and I just had to put the netbook version of Jaunty on it. This was actually very easy to do by way of this tutorial. Having such a portable computer has never been better.

Of course the default install is lacking as far as applications goes. Once I have all of the applications that I use installed, I'll give a run down of what I did after the installation. For now, I'm just happy that it installed just fine without having to do anything special.