I did a poorly-advised thing — I upgraded my ubuntu production laptop to 9.04 on the day of its release. I have noticed that each successive kernel update pushed out of become increasingly reliable, and so my comfort level with performing low-level upgrades.
So far, the update has gone smoothly. I did a “best server” check prior to the update, and very interestingly the process returned a server at Duke University, a very close distance from my house. The downloading and staging for the update was fairly quick, about 90 minutes — not bad for “release day.” Perhaps the “best server” task netted me an advantage.
As for the upgrade process, I liked the diff options when upgrading the core components, such as mysql (my.cnf) and lighttpd (lighttpd.conf) so that I won’t lose customizations that I forgot about but use daily.
After the upgrade, I restart. There’s a new, smaller (or at least the display configuration better matches the display characteristics) progress display during bootup. ubuntu touts a quicker startup. I’m not seeing it, but I wasn’t looking for one, either. After bootup, I reapply my old changes to the new lighttpd.conf file, and all my local web apps run fine. Excellent. Moving on, I lost compiz (disabled) and had to modify my compiz.conf file to fix it. (editing at /usr/bin/compiz — but the change depends on your hardware) Losing my compiz settings is a minor annoyance but not too serious either.
To be continued…
