Is it really two years since I started using the Linux OS? Coming up to I think, I was in Banff for the first time, so it must have been November 2008.
Any road, with the release of the latest Long Term Support version, Lucid Lynx (10.04), I thought I’d take the plunge tonight while Soph’s out and update from Intrepid Ibex (8.10) to this (don’t tell her).
I had to do an install of the new OS because I haven’t been updating to the intermediate versions, so I was a bit nervous about it, hence setting aside a quiet evening.
To my great happiness, it seems to have all gone smoothly. First, I slightly adjusted the partitions on my laptop’s hard drive with the new GParted CD (0.5.2) I just wanted to make sure that the new OS had a bit of elbow room.
I downloaded the .iso from the Ubuntu site and burnt it, then put it in the computer and rebooted.
In GParted I took the precaution of noting down what device names belonged to what, by me it was sda1 – Windows sda2 – Windows recovery, sda3 – linux root (system), sda4 – linux home (my files and data). This helped me to confidently check sda3 for re-formatting and the location for the root folder and to select sda4 to be my home folder as far as the new system was concerned – REMEMBER: Don’t format home! You’ll loose all your files.
After whirring and grinding away for a while, it was asking me to restart and now I’m typing away on the new operating system.
I’ve now got to work out what I need in terms of software, get them from the repositories again and do a bit of re-fiddling – get the windows partition to mount at startup (the dropbox folder symlink isn’t working because of this), etc.