Upgrading from 8.04 to 9.04

[Dave Hall]

On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 19:42 +1000, Scott Evans wrote:
> I tend to agree with the suggestion to start afresh and go with a clean
> install. When I updated my 8.10 to 9.04 due to the amount of stuff I
> have on my desktop PC the upgrade was around 2Gb of downloaded data! as
> compared to just 700Mb for the install CD.
> 
> Just make sure that you don't overwrite your Window$ partition! :P

Why? It is one of the first things I do with a new machine :P

As for fresh install vs upgrade.  I always upgrade.  When I got my new
laptop, I dumped the list of installed packages from my old laptop, did
a basic install on the new one, installed the list of packages from the
old one.  Next I copied /etc and /home over from the old one.  I took
the opportunity to switch from i386 to amd64.  The old laptop started
off running warty (or hoary) I forget which one, and has been upgraded
to pre beta versions regularly.  

Took me an afternoon to do all that.  Ubuntu is built on a Debian base.
It is designed to be upgraded, unlike some RPM based distros which still
struggle with upgrades.  The only time you should need to reinstall is
if you have a disk failure and you don't have backups or you want to
switch distros.

Cheers

Dave