About to upgrade from Hardy to Ibex

[dyingsun]

Time for an update I think. I love my Hardy system, its so stable, but I need to move with the times I guess. I've never done an upgrade before, only clean installs from CD/DVD, and I'm a little nervous (dont want to lose all my settings and data and whatnot).

Current setup:

Hardy 8.04.2 (64-bit Studio).
All updates applied, lot of extra software and server stuff.
running on an AMD Athlon 5000 x2 with 2 gigs of RAM,
integrated sound and graphics (Gigabyte MB)
250 gb HDD
etc...

I want to upgrade to Ibex 64 bit (Studio of course), and keep as much of my software as possible, and settings. Dont mind if look and feel changes, if things are moved around a bit or whatever, just hoping I won't break too much.

I have enough space on an external drive to backup my whole /home directory, and my var/www tree, which are the most important things for me, and I will be doing that regardless; can I simply copy the directory trees over the top of any new install, if I was to install Ibex straight from the DVD?


Any pro-tips anyone could share to help me avoid disaster? What's the best way to do it, using do-release-upgrade? Or should I just wipe it all off, close my eyes and think of England? My life no longer allows me the traditional all-nighters I used to pull when playing with Linux, so I want to do this as cleanly as possible!


TIA for any advice.
Damien

PS I've heard good and bad things about Ibex, re: slowness...is it as slow as some ppl say?

[Partyboi2]

Hi, if your hardy system is very stable do you really need to upgrade? You are currently using a long term support version and when the next LTS comes out you will have the option to upgrade straight to the new one without having to install the releases in between.
If you do want to upgrade then you will need to open up Software Sources and under the "Update" tab make sure that "Release Upgrade" is set to "Normal"
Make sure you machine is up to date and then there should be an option to upgrade to the next release when you open update-manager.

[dyingsun]

Hi Partyboi..
I didn't realise that (about the LTS versions allowing you to update directly without installing each release). I don't really *need* to upgrade, I guess I'm just thinking about the next version - don't want to get too far behind But that might be a good way to do it.

Thanks for the advice!