As of now, my laptop and desktop are running Ubuntu Edgy. They were both running ok before. They both had Windows XP SP2 and always seemed slow. The Dell laptop was 1.7ghz and had 512MB of RAM. Nothing special, but it always felt a bit sluggish with firefox and 15 tabs open. The desktop was used as a fileserver, but I would do some work on it now and then. It has 1 gig of RAM, so pretty much everything runs fast on it.

So one afternoon, partly because my inner geekiness wanted to come out, and partly because I was bored, I decided to install Ubuntu Dapper on the desktop I downloaded the live CD from the Ubuntu site and installed it. Went just fine. It found everything the first time properly. Quite amazing.

Now I wanted to put Dapper on my laptop. Googled to see if anyone had installed Dapper on a Dell Inspiron 6000. Found some postings about people having issues with RedHat and Mepis. Decided to try Dapper on the laptop anyway.

Wow. Worked the first time again.

I’ve been itching to try Firefox 2.0 and it wasn’t coming up in the Dapper updates, but it is the installed browser in Edgy. Of course I could have just downloaded FF 2 separately and tried it out, but it was time to try something slightly different. Dapper always seemed a bit slow on the laptop for some reason. Granted it was faster than XP Media that Dell had installed with a bunch of other random crap, but still a little sluggish with Dapper.

So I went to the Ubuntu forums site and looked up instructions on upgrading. It was pretty easy. Just type the following in a terminal:

gksu "update-manager -c"

Wow again. Everything installed ok the first time around. Not only that, but everything seems to run faster. Maybe its all in my head, but Firefox and Flock definitely seem to be running very nicely.

Then I decided to upgrade the desktop. Ran the above command. All the files downloaded ok and then the installation started. At some point, it came back with an error saying the openoffice something package was corrupt. Oh no. I open up Synaptic and get an error saying Software Index is broken, run sudo apt-get install -f to fix it. I run the command and notice that it still fails when trying to do something with the openoffice package. But I could see that it didn’t try to download the openoffice package, but was trying to install it from the /var/cache/apt directory.

Maybe the package got messed up when downloading? Looking in Synaptic -> Preferences -> Files, there is an option to delete cached package files. I do that and rerun the apt-get install -f. Everything runs ok.

Reboot.

When I log in, I get an error saying something in Gnome setting barfed and themes and icons may not work. Oh great. I close the dialog box to move on. The Bug Buddy app shows up and tells me that nautilus has crashed and to send a bug report. Umm, maybe later. I cancel. But everytime I move the mouse, the Bug Buddy shows up. Irritating.

I go back into Synaptic and click on Mark All Upgrades. It tells me I have over 200 packages that need updating. WTF?!? I look through the list and nautilus is on it. So I do upgrades for all the packages. Reboot.

Finally, everything works ok and there seem to be no errors. Everything seems to be running a lot faster like the laptop.

So while the laptop upgrade went smoothly, the desktop was slightly painful. Nothing that difficult, but its easy to see why some folks are frustrated with Edgy. I wouldn’t want to revert back to Dapper since everything is working now, but people are justified in being PO’ed at the upgrade process. Not sure if Edgy didn’t go through some decent QA cycle, but the Ubuntu folks definitely need to fix the upgrade process for their future releases.