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From Dapper to Edgy

It’s always a strange feeling when my main Linux box is stable and running great, so I figured it was time to update from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy (which is still pre-release.) I took the simple approach of swapping “dapper” with “edgy” in my “/etc/apt/sources.list” file, and using aptitude to handle the dist-upgrade. The process took some time (there was a lot to download), but after a reboot and another pass through dist-upgrade (using the Update Manager), everything came together just fine. (FYI, this is on a dual-AMD64 (Opteron) machine with an NVIDIA card.)

First impression: WOW, fonts looks MUCH nicer! Particularly in Firefox (a 2.0 RC build), which now seems to actually be using anti-aliased fonts. The improvement is text display is a welcome change, since this machine has always lagged behind my OS X boxes in terms of on-screen readability.

So far everything seems to be working quite well. Sound is working a little more reliably (though XMMS isn’t happy about it), but to be fair, I’m running audio through an M-Audio Audiophile USB box, which is probably a bit far from the norm. Also, I had an issue with Lighttpd while updating, but it was easily resolved with some manual intervention.

For more information on Edgy and how to update, check out the following:

• Edgy Release Notes — contains a list of What’s New.
• Unofficial Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Starter Guide — contains instructions on updating at the end of the guide.
• Edgy release candidate: Call for testing — contains links to ISO’s, if you’re into that kind of thing.