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After you installed the new version, you maybe will say ”where is my bookmarks!!!!?” so, Before upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which will release on April 29, their are 5 things recommended to do with the distribution you already have.
Around the time Ubuntu 8.10 was released, my hard drive died (OK, I smashed it through my laptop's case). I figured that, as long as I was reinstalling anyway, I should try upgrading to 8.10. Unfortunately, I experienced a couple of problems with 8.10, so I abandoned it and reverted to 8.04. Since then, I have been running 8.04, which is conveniently an LTS release.
1) Never use apt-get or aptitude: Apt(itude) is great (it's got supercow powers), but for upgrading use update-manager instead (see the how-to below). Update-manager still uses apt in the background, but additionally fixes common errors, removes old artwork, etc.
If you're thinking of upgrading from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7, why not give Linux a try? Matt Hartley ponders the pros and cons of both platforms, the relative pain of making a change, and the economic incentives for continuing to favor a buggy, insecure platform.
I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best. You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.
One of the better features of Mandriva Linux is its updates notification tool, which not only alerts you when there are available package updates, but also notifies the user when a new version is available - a distribution upgrade. This article documents my experience upgrading Mandriva One 2010 and Mandriva Free 2010 to Mandriva One 2010 Spring and Mandriva Free 2010 Spring respectively.
So gNewSense 2.0 came out a few days ago as the gNewSense crew is tracking Ubuntu LTS releases. Of course, the bad part is that there is no upgrade path from gNewSense 1.0 to 2.0. Ubuntu recommends upgrading by going from release to release so upgrading is not feasible (or is too hard for the developers to implement) so freedom lovers need to have a good backup strategy.
If you're upgrading from the version of VirtualBox you get from Ubuntu 8.04's repository to the latest version from Sun, there are a few issues that could trip you up. I was doing this recently in order to run the latest Ubuntu alpha releases in a virtual machine, more on that in the second half of this post.
