Sunday, April 22, 2007

Easy Upgrade to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Last Thursday, April 19, Ubuntu released its latest version, 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). The announcement is here. I decided to wait a few days before upgrading my operating system at home from 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 just in case there were any bugs in the upgrade process that would get fixed immediately after the release. Even though a fair amount of people were reporting various problems with the upgrade process on the Ubuntu Forums, I decided to give it a go.

I didn't customize my installation very much so I figured the upgrade process had a good chance of succeeding. Ubuntu's upgrade instructions recommend upgrading via the network, but since many people were reporting that the upgrade servers were getting hammered due to the recent release, I decided to upgrade using the "Alternate CD". I downloaded the ISO using Azureus, my favorite BitTorrent client. It took a while to download, so I just let it go overnight. Then I burned it to a CD and popped it it. Ubuntu immediately popped up a window asking me if I wanted to upgrade to 7.04. I clicked "Upgrade", followed the instructions, and everything went smoothly! In less than an hour later, I was fully upgraded to Feisty Fawn.

I haven't really noticed any major differences between Edgy and Feisty yet other than the fact that the "Hibernate" feature of my computer is working now and it never worked with Edgy. That is pretty exciting for me actually, since I had been completely shutting down the computer before, and now I can let it go to sleep. I think it works now because Feisty has a new version of the Kernel, 2.6.20, which probably contains recently added support for newer hardware. The rest of the new features in Feisty are listed here. There are also two new games included with Feisty: Sudoku and Chess.

I can't decide whether or not to try the upgrade at work. I can't afford any downtime at work, so if it doesn't go as smoothly, I would be screwed. I will probably wait until things at work slow down a bit, and then try the upgrade on a Friday. That way, if I end up having to reinstall, I can do it over the weekend.

3 comments:

Sameer said...

You use Ubuntu at work? Very nice!

Ken Weiner said...

Yes, I sure do. In fact, my whole team of 5 developers is now using Ubuntu as a primary desktop at work. Unfortunately, we still have to have VMWare loaded to run Windows to support applications like Outlook and Visio.

gbdarren said...

I saw this on ZDNet:
One giant step for desktop Linux

Despite download and installation difficulties, ZDNet staffer calls Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn "by far the best and easiest version of Linux" that he has ever used and "a simple (and safe) way for PC owners to experiment with Linux."

More: Full Article

Other Links:
Screenshots: First look at 'Feisty Fawn'

Or is Kubuntu 7.04 the best distro for Windows users?