<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Dave Hall wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:1242850651.18865.68.camel@glider.skwashd.lan" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 19:42 +1000, Scott Evans wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">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 </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Why? It is one of the first things I do with a new machine :P </pre> </blockquote> :-) <blockquote cite="mid:1242850651.18865.68.camel@glider.skwashd.lan" type="cite"> <pre wrap=""> 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.</pre> </blockquote> I was going to write about this, but Dave beat me to it!  However, let me repeat the important part: "Ubuntu is built on a Debian base. It is designed to be upgraded." My laptop started on 8.04 amd64 and has been upgraded to 8.10 and 9.04.  Both went flawlessly.  I recently upgraded my wife's desktop from 8.10 i386 to 9.04.  It started life on 7.04.  I've never had easier or smoother upgrades than on Ubuntu. There are always minor issues with upgrades (e.g. scanning from my HP OfficeJet broke on the 9.04 upgrade and i haven't worked out what's wrong yet), but in general they work well.  I do too many customizations to my systems to be able to just reinstall every time. Paul </body> </html>