Getting Feisty

[Evan Leibovitch]

Well, it took about 36 hours but I was finally able to do the 'online'
upgrade of Kubuntu from 6.10 ("edgy") to the newly released 7.04
("feisty") on my laptop.

It's not a process I'd recommend to the impatient, or those who want to
know what's going on. I expected Ubuntu servers to be really busy on the
first day of release, but there were a few surprises.

1) Upgrades, apparently, can only be done online, and not from a CDROM.
This means that the benefits of bittorrent, that would be really helpful
at high-download times, are lost to upgraders. (update: apparently this
is now possible but you need to download the "alternate" CDROM and the
process is a little tougher for KDE users.)

2) The Canadian download server seems to have really low capacity, which
hurts because you can't choose what server to use for the initial
upgrade. No menu choices; it picks one for you and that's it. My upgrade
process crashed six times because the Canadian server would simply
refuse connections at various points through the days. Once the core
upgrade is complete, you can choose a different country repository and
things work more normally. For this reaso I would suggest purging your
system of large non-essential packages before doing the upgrade, them
come back and install them later when you can choose the best repository.

3) Every time you restart the upgrade system after a crash, it has to
re-download a whole bunch of initial files. While the main software .deb
files are cached once you get going, about 15-20 minutes of downloading
has to be redone every time you start the install process, even if it
just stopped on you. On the good side, if it crashes midway through a
download of a file, the system can recover the partial download and pick
up where it left off.

Visually things are a little different, but there's little that's earth
shattering. It's nice to be up to OpenOffice 2.2 and the newest KDE.
Some icons such as network and battery status are different. But this is
certainly more of an incremental bump than a major shift in anything.

- Evan
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