Best way to prepare for migration to Hoary?

[Eamonn Sullivan]

I'm ecstatically happy with Warty and am planning to upgrade to Hoary,
maybe well into feature freeze/debugging, in March, or when it is
officially released. But I want to get the maximum benefit when I do
migrate. I've been following this strategy:

-Keeping all the meta-packages -- ubunut-desktop, etc.
(ubuntu-backports gives me firefox 1.0, which is really the only thing
I was missing).

-Booting the live CD occassionally to check on progress. It's still
not without problems. X currently nearly or completely unusable on a
Windows XP machine with a flat panel I'm targetting for possible
wiping and my current Warty system with a CRT -- both using very
recent Intel motherboards with on-board video. But the hardware is
detected correctly (frequency and resolution options are correct in
xorg.conf), it's just migrating to what actually starts up, so I
remain hopeful (and filed a report to bugzilla).

One happy development in the latest Hoary test live CD is that it now 
correctly recognizes and configures my wireless network card (netgear
WG311v2). I've had to use ndiswrapper in Warty. I guess there's been
more progress at the kernel level for the chipset. I want to make sure
the drivers for the card are updated when I migrate to Hoary.

When I do a dist-upgrade,  will there be any installer magic hardware
detection or will all of the currently installed packages simply be
updated? What's the best way to ensure that there's another round of
auto-detecting? Is that done at every boot (so I can just comment-out
ndiswrapper after upgrading and see what happens)?

I know I can do dpkg-reconfigure, but that doesn't seem to have any
auto-detection. I have to input all the settings. I suppose I could
boot the live CD, run dpkg-reconfigure, write down all of the
settings, and then do the same on my dist-upgraded Hoary install. Is
that the best way?

-Eamonn