[UbuntuWomen] New version

[Akkana Peck]

A. Malaika Sharp writes:
> I am a bit reluctant to upgrade to a newer version and experience
> problems in areas that are working fine now.
> 
> What do you think?

I've had several problems with Jaunty, while Intrepid is pretty
solid.

If you have the disk space, your best bet is to back up your old
partition before upgrading.

On my disks, I make several relatively small partitions, maybe
15G or so (pause to laugh about what I would have thought ten or
even five years ago if someone told me I'd be referring to 15G
as "small"), one small shared /boot partition, a swap partition,
and use the rest of the disk for /home or other shared data.

Then you can install a new release, or make a copy and upgrade the
copy, without risking your working install. You can install a new
Ubuntu directly from a CD if you want ... or if you want to upgrade,
it's a few more steps but you get to keep most of your existing
apps and settings.  I started writing out how to do that, but it
turned out a bit long so I made it a blog post instead:
http://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/install/upgrading-without-risk.html

That doesn't address making new partitions if your disk isn't already
partitioned that way; I've used gparted for that, but you'd probably
have to boot from a live CD if you need to resize your existing
partition. I'll let someone with more experience with that write
the howto on that part. :-)

	...Akkana