Ubuntu 8.04 upgrade

My next post was going to be about opensource software for university but I recently upgraded my Ubuntu distro from 7.10 Gutsy to 8.04LTS Hardy. The actual process of upgrading was painless and simple but horrifyingly slow!

The installation

Proof I was running 7.10:

The process starts off by going to the Update Manger (system>administration>update manager) and clicking on "upgrade"

It then shows you the release notes:

Before downloading the upgrade tool:

The upgrade tool will configure a couple of things before downloading all the packages

Which in my case took this long:

Not only did I go and make a sandwich but I also watched TV, played Halo 3, fixed some things on one of my websites, ate said sandwich, fell asleep, read 6 chapters of my book... the list goes on. And the moral is this, if your internet connection is as slow as mine... get a free CD from here it's only 6 to 8 weeks for delivery!

Finally the upgrade tool got round to doing some upgrading. This took a far more respectable 45 minutes. The system was then rebooted.

Post install

The first thing I noticed was a much faster boot time. The installation had completely ignored my custom resolution so I was given some horrible stretchy pixels on reaching the desktop. However Hardy handles resolutions better than Gutsy and within a few clicks I had 1360x768 back. In Gutsy it took me a couple of hours and a lot of digging around in xorg.conf to get that resolution.

The second thing I noticed is that I'm now running Firefox 3 beta 5 instead of the trusty Firefox 2.0. It's nice but I'm not sure I like the fact that I wasn't asked whether I wanted it or not, I was going to hold out until it was out of beta.

There was a problem with emerald and 8.04 which I found a temporary fix to. Not sure if its done the trick as the word on the web it that the solution doesn't survive a re-boot but hopefully I can find a more permanent solution.

Other than the odd graphical glitch during the installation the process was smooth and I'm happy with the result. I mean who would expect no glitches whist updating an OS while running it! I'd like to see Microsoft do that!