Upgrade to Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS - Beginner's questions

[Charly Avital]

Hi,

The last Digest I received is dated 4/21/08, I reckon everybody is busy 
upgrading to 8.04. I'll try my luck, hoping for some feedback
Four hours ago, I was running Gutsy 7.10, and upgraded to Hardy Heron 
8.04 through 'update manager -d'. Downloading the required packages went 
fairly well.

After installation system Monitor indicates now:
Ubuntu 7
Ubuntu
Release 8.04 (hardy)
Kernel Linux 2.6.24-16-generic
Gnome 2.22.1

But, during installation, I had a few warnings (about openoffice.org 
writer2latex), but the critical warning was:
"upgrade aborts now, system could be in unusable state, recovery will 
run now (dpkg --configure -a).

I have *not* run 'dpkg --configure -a' because I "assume" the 
installation process already did it.
Question: should I do it, and why?

I have forced grub to start in recovery mode, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic, 
and here I am.
Question: in spite of the critical warning "upgrade aborts now...", and 
in spite of the indications of System Monitor, am I really running 8.04?

The new desktop now sports a beautiful of a heron...

Thanks in advance.

Charly
MacOS X 10.5.2 - Ubuntu 8.04 (under virtual ware) - GnuPG 1.4.9 - gpg2 
2.0.9 -
Thunderbird version 2.0.0.12 (20080227) - Enigmail 0.95.6