[clug] Upgrading question

[Andrew Janke]

2009/4/30 Dave Upton <dave.upton at y7mail.com>:
>>What specifically in terms of settings do you
>>want to keep? or are afraid to loose?
>
> I am thinking along the lines of Wine and programs that are installed under that and then such things as my mic which took me ages to get working.  But also stuff like additional repositories that were added or adobe or flash and those sorts of things.  The little things that make life easier and more pleasant.

Of course there are no guarantees (just ask anyone who has upgraded
any OS..) still I found the intrepid->jaunty upgrade rather unbumpy
beyond an issue with a video card driver (I have an older ATI infused
laptop) and a mouse button mapping thing. In the mouse's case it is a
mapping that is non-standard though.

As for wine, I haven't noticed anything different or broken, I use it
for some kids games and a few other legacy things. Everything else
worked "ace".  You can always test the mic and other things with a
live CD.

What I have tended to find (in general) is that the more I upgrade the
less I have to mess around with to make things work as I no longer
have to resort to backports and hand-built packages to get the
features I want. Flash worked "out of the box" after pressing the
install button in firefox for one. Things like TV tuners and other
hardware also tend to start to "just work" as more and more drivers
are included. Things like Xorg also seem to be getting far far too
easy to configure these days. (back in MY day...)

Remember also that a Ubuntu/Debian "dist-upgrade" is little more than
a whole bunch of collected updates for a bunch of packages that have
been called a release after a line was drawn in the sand on some
schedule. (In Ubuntu's case 6 monthly). Perhaps I am oversimplifying a
bit here but I think of dist upgrades as incremental as opposed to a
"whole new thing".

> Then again I am also wondering if upgrading to the the latest version every six months is worth it?  Oh dear I think that last question means I haven't truly morphed into a fully fledged Linux user.

Not at all. I always upgrade if only because I dev software and thus
will have to build packages for the new release sooner or later. I
have only ever upgraded after a release though and not to a beta/alpha
on my main (ok, only) machine.

> I liked the descriptions of the various fests.  I realise I missed one which was a fixfest but I think I can guess what it is now and that pony tails, pizza and computers will be involved.

Correct, as to which order these will be involved is probably debatable.


--
Andrew Janke
(a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883