First a big thank you to the Ubuntu community for providing their time to put together such a fine Operating System. If you want to learn more about Ubuntu you can go to the following web site..

After being busy with other stuff and not having much time to play with my Ubuntu install I decided I would fire up Edgy Eft and see what software had updates that needed to be installed. After loading the update manager up I could see there were about 100 updates and so I figured I would update all the software. After doing this update I did a reboot and the computer was working fine and I loaded the update manager up again and I seen the button on the side of the update manager that if I clicked it I would be able to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu and that would be Feisty Fawn. The big question is how much stuff will get screwed up if I hit the upgrade button?

The reason I ask the question about stuff screwing up is do to a earlier experience I had when trying to do a upgrade on earlier versions of Ubuntu. Last time I did this upgrade option all my applications were freaking out and giving me loads of errors after the upgrade.

Before doing the upgrade this time I figured what the hell if it works it works and if it screws up like it did last time I will just do a format and reinstall Feisty Fawn from scratch. So I hit the upgrade button and the upgrading process starts. It took about 30 minutes to upgrade from Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn.

While doing the upgrade a screen come up and said I would loose the install of Beryl that I had installed on Edy Eft. This to me wasn’t a big deal and I figured I would be able to enable it again after the upgrade was done do to the fact Beryl was by default included with Feisty Fawn.

So as I was saying before, the install took about 30 minutes and then it was done. I did a reboot and much to my amazement all of my applications still seemed to be working after the upgrade.

One thing I did notice though is somehow the sound settings for Edgy Eft were not transferred over to Feisty fawn. So all the normal system sounds you get when you log in and log off were not there. A quick run through in the sound settings and I quickly selected the on board sound and everything seemed fine. One thing that did boggle my mind was XMMS wasn’t playing audio at all and so I had to go into its settings and mess around with them to get it working.

Despite the fact I got XMMS to work sometimes after the computer was shut down and restarted XMMS was still loosing its audio settings. Then I went in and set them again and for now it seems like the audio settings are finally starting to stick and not be lost.

The only other thing I noticed from the upgrade is the Desktop Effects in Feisty Fawn don’t seem to work at all. I’m not sure if this was because I had Beryl installed before the upgrade or not but I can’t get the Desktop Effects to work at all. When I try and run the Desktop Effects program in Feisty Fawn I get an error that says Desktop effects could not be enabled. I’m not to worried about the desktop effects since I don’t use that much anyway.

What I am impressed with though is the fact the upgrade option worked as good as it did in the first place. I was expecting a nightmare situation like I run into last time where half my stuff didn’t even run.
I think this shows that the team behind Ubuntu are making things better and better all the time. I suspect in the next version of Ubuntu the update manager will be even more fine tuned and you will get even less problems with it.

In conclusion despite the fact the upgrade option is pretty solid the way it is now, I still think people are better off doing a fresh install of Ubuntu if your going to upgrade from a previous version of Ubuntu. You wouldn’t run into the problems I did if you do a clean install.

Update October 6 2007…

Well I figured I would update this Review of Ubuntu because I managed to figure out what was going on with the sound on the computer. As stated in the Review above I thought when I did the upgrade on Ubuntu that it screwed up some sound settings and my sound wasn’t working right a lot of the time. For the hell of it I decided I would pull the Maudio sound card out of the computer and see if the sound issues had something to do with it and the fact I was using the onboard Nforce 2 sound chip on the motherboard.

As soon as I pulled the Maudio sound card out of the computer all my sound issues have vanished. The the computer is working just fine under the Nforce2 sound that the motherboard provides. I think the problems I was having has to do with a conflict somewhere with the Maudio sound card and the Nforce2 motherboard sound working at the same time. So what I will be doing in the future is moving the Maudio sound card to different PCI ports and see if that solves the conflict.

So the upgrade for Ubuntu went a lot smoother then I thought, I just didn’t know that the Maudio sound card was giving me issues at the time and not the Ubuntu upgrade itself causing the issues.

WolfManz611..