Scribblings and Geekery

Ubuntu 8.04 is the second LTS release of the incredibly popular Linux distro. Inspired, I did a fresh install of my desktop at work and found the process smooth and about as simple as an XP install¹, and am quite happy with the results.

Then, I thought it might be fun to see if my svn box in the basement would survive a command-line upgrade again (it worked for 7.04 to 7.10), so why not? The process is fairly straightforward. As root (or via sudo):

1. sed -e 's/gutsy/hardy/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get dist-upgrade
4. ... wait ...
5. shutdown -r now

During my install this morning, and the corresponding install of several packages not included by default, I found that the default repository [us.archive.ubuntu.com] is really slow right now. Synaptic Package Manager has this nifty "find the best mirror" tool, and lo and behold, the best option for me is in Switzerland [mirror.switch.ch], so rather than just replace 'gutsy' with 'hardy', I updated my sources.list to match the fresh one at work.

Then I saw this:

947 upgraded, 194 newly installed, 67 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 763MB of archives. After unpacking 473MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Well, yeah, of course... but wow, that's some update! Undaunted, I pressed on. Sure enough, it really was that simple. The upgrade on my Dual-PIII 667 (yeah, that's right, PIII baby!) workstation took just over 4 hours to complete, according to my history, so not too shabby.

Grab ubuntu 8.04 directly from the ubuntu.com web site, or from one of many mirrors.