doing an upgrade, I prefer to do a fresh install every 6 months, with about 4 installations on an 80GB disk. That way I automatically discard all the programs and rubbish that one accumulates over time. Fresh installs took just a little over 30 minutes.
Hi Michael, Yes I certainly appreciate the fresh install approach after having a few failed attempts in the past. I guess one thing that you get better with over time is respecting the package management system and not doing "./configure make make install" on some bit of software you happen to have found on the web or do dpkp --force..... to force the .deb package to install. I suspect this makes it much easier for the upgrade tools to figure how to upgrade the system. Whenever possible, I try to make a .deb file using checkinstall if I cannot find an appropriate binary. In my case, I downloaded the Koala .iso first and backed up my home drive before beginning so I was ready to do a reinstall if it all went to custard. But I thought, a reinstall, followed by all my customisations is going to take a day so I might as well try this upgrade process because I knew I hadn't abused the package management system. As I mentioned it work well. I was impressed it didn't overwrite Amarok 1.4 with Amarok 2.2. I'm a big fan of Amarok and will happily upgrade to Amarok 2.2 (and beyond) when I know it handles podcasts well (something to tinker with soon). Amarok 2.0 was the default install for Jaunty Jackalope and it was far too bleeding edge for a production release. I am looking forward to Digikam going into the Koala backports(2) http://www.digikam.org/. The KDE3 to KDE4 rewrite is nearing completion now in beta5. Cheers, Chris