Gutsy on my laptop

My laptop (specs) has generally done quite well with fresh Ubuntu installs, but I have never been able to complete an upgrade easily or with everything working…until now. I started out with 5.04 (Hoary) and have tried to do an OS upgrade for each release since, and have generally ended up doing a fresh install (thankfully, I’ve always used a separate partition for /home, so this wasn’t really a big deal). The problems could have been caused by my incompetence, but I can’t prove or disprove that.

However, today I successfully upgraded from 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gutsy) using the Update Manager. Woo hoo!

What did I do differently? Almost nothing. I was extra careful to remove absolutely everything that I had installed from anywhere other than the official Ubuntu repos, and I switched from the restricted fglrx driver for my video card to the open ATI driver. That was all. Then I pulled the trigger and waited. The whole thing took about 2 1/2 to 3 hours and I’m up and running and happy.

When I did the final reboot, my desktop came up and offered to install the restricted fglrx driver for me as well as a restricted driver for the internal modem, which I have never even attempted to use on this laptop. Cool! I did so, and everything went swimmingly.

Thank you, developers! I’m off to play.

14 comments October 23rd, 2007