Upgrade

I've been using Ubuntu for a little over a year now, and I haven't been happier with a Linux distribution. I started using Linux with Red Hat 7.2 in about 2002. I moved to Mandrake (now Mandriva) which I used for quite a while, but there always seemed to be something flaky that just didn't work on each release for me. I spent an entire weekend installing just a base system of Gentoo, then another day and a half compiling KDE, then more time compiling... After about a week of that I decided I didn't have the kind of time Gentoo demanded, even though my geek cred would suffer. I'm also administering a Fedora Core 4 server, which I'll have to upgrade soon. I'll probably replace it with Ubuntu 6.06 because of the long (6 years!) support cycle.

Ubuntu has a reputation of being a newbie distro, which is fine with me. It means it's easy to install, maintain, and use. I'm not quite sure why that's a bad thing. There is a huge list of software that can be easily installed, and there is nothing that can't be done with Ubuntu that can be done with any other distribution.

Decided to upgrade my system to Edgy Eft today. Normally I don't wait until the final release of software, installing betas and release candidates. For some reason I've been taking my time though. I hadn't even updated to Firefox 2.0 yet, mostly because I've being Opera lately because of some issues I've been having with Firefox.

I started the install expecting a lot of problems. I opened up a terminal, typed in gksu "update-manager -c" and let 'er rip. After about 2 hours of downloading and installing, I rebooted the system.

After the boot process was finished the nVidia splash screen surprised me by actually appearing, letting me know that my 3D drivers were actually installed and running. After logging in, KDE started up with no problems. KDE 3.5 is looking very pretty too, with lots of neat effects including true transparency of windows. I'm going to install Beryl and see how it looks.

So far everything has gone flawlessly. I'm still expecting trouble, but I'm pretty impressed so far.