xubuntu upgrade/install

[Daniel Mons]

Sebastian Spiess wrote:
> So donwloaded live CD and booted from it and it always gets stuck whith 'starting GNOME desktop manager'

I've had a few people tell me the same, and upon investigation the
system did eventually get into GNOME, but could take upwards of half an
hour to get there due to slow CPU speed and low RAM.

While LiveCDs are a nice idea, they are not practical for low-RAM
systems.  My advice is to use the "Alternate" installer instead.  FWIW,
I use this installer even on high-RAM systems for two major reasons:

1) It's much faster.  A full install can sometimes be done in the time
it takes the LiveCD GUI installer just to boot to the desktop!

2) It also offers advanced disk setup options like RAID, LVM and
Encrypted LVM (a must for laptop users).  These can be done
automatically by the installer (good for new users wanting advanced
features), manually by hand (good for us old greybeards who know exactly
what we want), or skipped altogether for simple partitioning.

It is not difficult to use.  There's no mouse input, but menus are
driven via ncurses (a quasi GUI system for console), and all options are
selectable with the keyboard arrows.  Don't fear the Alternate installer
just because it's not mouse driven.

> 
> I tried different things for booting the machine
> vga=792 - this was needed in gutsy
> nosplash... to see what is happening
> fully live cd
> live cd with graphics compatibility (or whatever it is called) mode selected (F4 during boot)
>

vga=normal is the way to set a standard text/non-framebuffer mode on
standard PC hardware.  Also remove the "quiet" option to see more stuff
happening (in conjunction with nosplash, which you use already).

-Dan