LinLog

Kubuntu Feisty is out and I've upgraded my desktop. All in all, it was a fairly painless process.

The upgrade process for Feisty was much improved over easlier versions. The first time I upgraded, from Hoary to Breezy, it didn't go so well. In fact, the first couple of upgrades were fairly risky affairs. The upgrade from Breezy to Dapper was an unmitigated disaster, with the upgrade simply removing some key packages, like all of KDE.

This time, it went pretty smoothly. I did have to start over again, because the upgrade stalled while trying to contact the PLF repositories, which are now offline, but after I removed that entry from my sources.list, things went very smoothly.

The best part was probably that this upgrade was all graphical. You use Adept to install all the available updates, and when it's done, a little wizard pops up telling you that a new version of Kubuntu is available and asking if you'd like to install it. After that, you click next a few times, watch a few progress bars, and click through a few confirm prompts. That's about it. The installer even reboots the system for you at the end.

The actual upgrade took several hours to complete. In my case, it actually ran for around 12 hours, but I'm sure much of that was just sitting there waiting for input. You see, downloading the updage packages took a couple of hours, but then it prompted me to install. And then, throughout the installation, there were several prompts for configuring various packages. So, unfortunately, it's not something you can just leave for a few hours and come back to an upgraded system. It needs a little babysitting. I had to come back periodically and do things like accept the default options for some RAID software that I don't even know why it's installed (I don't have a RAID array on my system) or tell it what to do with configuration files that has changed in some trivial way. Thus, since I was busy, I ended up spreading it out over the entire day.

So far, Feisty is nice enough. I haven't used it too much yet, but there doesn't seem to be much worthy of comment so far. It seems like just new versions of everything and a few incremental improvements. Which is as it should be. If I wanted a revolutionary change, I'd buy a copy of Windows Vista. Kubuntu seems to be getting very solid now, which is just how I like things.