Hey, all.
I'll have a fresh Boomer memory up tomorrow. In the meantime, my Ubuntu system, which, as you know, I am VERY impressed with, is about to perform an automatic upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy.
If this goes smoothly, I'll be crowing about it. If not, I'll let you know why.
Stay tuned, I'm planning an update today (unless things go WAY south!).
Okay, here's how it went . . .
Smooth as silk? Not really. However, it was certainly as smooth as polyester.
The process went on behind the scenes as I worked on updating this site. It was suggested by the wizard that I shut things down, but I kept chugging along with several apps open. Sometimes things would freeze for a moment, then back to normal.
Occasionally, I would be asked yes/no questions by the wizard. After downloading everything, it took about 45 minutes to upgrade.
When it came back, my video was ugly generic. No surprise there, the same thing frequently happens with Windows upgrades.
However, I couldn't enable the restricted driver that was working earlier. It turns out it was because I had booted into a server kernel instead of a generic one. The server kernel is evidently enabled by default when you upgrade. Editing the menu.lst file in /boot/grub/ allowed me to set the earlier version of the generic kernel to default.
That's another thing. My Nvidia proprietary driver wouldn't work with the latest Gutsy kernel. Oh well, that should be updated automatically soon.
The system fonts are also a bit squirrely. They don't look exactly smooth. I'm sure that's fixable, too.
(update: the font issue is because the interface for Gutsy is just a bit different. I was able to tell my screens and graphics manager that I had a wide screen, and suddenly I had access to a slew of resolutions I'd never seen before! I ended up with 1440x900, and it's perfect!)
So all in all, I would rate the experience 8/10. Not bad for a complete system upgrade.
Here's another update: I upgraded my year-old Dell laptop I use at work. For some reason, I didn't have the update option in the Update Manager. I worked around it by downloading the ISO for the text-based installation and burning it to a CD. When I popped the CD in, I was asked if I wanted to upgrade.
The upgrade took about 45 minutes. When it was over, I nervously rebooted. To my delight, the high-resolution video worked out of the box, and so did the wireless! The only tweak i had to apply was downloading a firmware upgrade so my wireless could once again communicate through WPA encryption. I would rate that total experience 9.5/10!