Karmic Upgrade vs. Fresh Karmic Install

[jerickson314]

I've heard that people have had various issues upgrading the Starling to Karmic. Would I be less likely to have issues if I do a fresh install and install the System76 driver according to http://knowledge76.com/index.php/Restoring_Your_Netbook, rather than doing an upgrade from the update manager? I already have /home on a separate partition, so I don't anticipate much hassle.

[k64]

I've heard that people have had various issues upgrading the Starling to Karmic. Would I be less likely to have issues if I do a fresh install and install the System76 driver according to http://knowledge76.com/index.php/Restoring_Your_Netbook, rather than doing an upgrade from the update manager? I already have /home on a separate partition, so I don't anticipate much hassle.

It would make perfect sense to do a clean install of Karmic. Ubuntu 9.10 will certainly benefit from it. Considering how buggy it is to begin with, it will only exacerbate the problem if you upgrade.

[thomasaaron]

We've not found 9.10 to be very buggy. In fact, we've found it to be one of the most solid versions yet.

However, for whatever reason, the upgrade processes from 8.10 to 9.04 and from 9.04 to 9.10 seemed to be particularly troublesome.

I always like to make sure I'm well backed up and then try the online upgrade. If it's too racked with troubles, I just do a fresh install. You learn a lot that way.

[bvandev]

Keep in mind that you generally only hear about the problems in the forum, not the successes. It's challenging to determine how many upgrades went through without a hitch. I upgraded the day after the new wireless driver was released according to the stated instructions. I needed to install the grub-pc package as noted in several threads, but other than that, it worked fine.

That said, I'm guessing a clean installation won't take any longer than an upgrade. The bulk of the time is spent waiting for the download, which will be the same either way. As long as you don't have too much invested in the configuration and tweaking of your current set-up, you may as well go with the clean install.

This is probably not too much help, just another voice from the crowd.

Good luck.

[jml]

bvandev, I agree with you. We users rarely clog the forums with random success stories. However, in my opinion, a clean install is less problematic. I have been playing with Linux since 1999. While my upgrades of pure Debian have usually gone without a hitch, I can't remember when an upgrade for an Ubuntu install worked well for me. 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, all upgrades hosed my system. Thank goodness for backups. So whenever I upgrade an Ubuntu box, I tend to do a clean install including repartitioning the hard drive, rather than using existing partitions. Just my two cents worth.

Joe

[WarLokk]

I did the upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 with no issue (well aside from that broken grub problem but that was solved literally in 2 mins) Since then it has been smooth sailing