Ubuntu 5.10 to 6.06 Upgrade Experience

[Jeff Garland]

Small contribution for those Ubuntu users thinking of upgrading to 6.06.

Short story -- I went thru the process today.  It was completely 
painless -- it worked perfectly.  The upgrade has some really nice 
software upgrades including an upgrade to Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 
3.5. Do it!

Longer story -- I was mostly a Mandrake user for several years (I still 
have a Mandrake machine), but recently I built a new AMD64 machine and 
installed the 5.10 -- 64 bit version of Ubuntu (thx for the prize at the 
dev meeting!).  I was a little disappointed since 5.10 had a very old 
version of Firefox.  Of course, compared to Mandrake the combination of 
apt and the graphical counterparts, Ubuntu is so, so, so nice to keep 
updated with the latest software.  After several nightmares with 
Mandrake upgrades, I was apprehensive, but the major upgrade from 5.10 
to 6.06 didn't disappoint.  I can honestly say that this was the easiest 
major upgrade of an OS/Applications ever in my life -- just kicked it 
off, kept working away for about 30 minutes while the downloads were 
going, and then one reboot, and back to business.  Sweet.

In case no one noticed, this is a place where Linux has a major lead on 
MS right now -- yes, you can get 64bit Windows, but try to find device 
drivers and applications -- it's tough.  On top of that, the idea of 
installing a major OS upgrade and having it automatically upgrade all 
the apps -- well, that just can't happen on Windows. Anyway, many thanks 
to all the folks that made this one fleeting moment of software euphoria 
possible :)

Jeff