8.04 to 10.04 - best way to upgrade?

[elysianfields44]

I have 8.04 and I could just upgrade through the update manager, but I remember reading somewhere that a fresh install is better than an upgrade. I am curious how that works (and what the differences are). I should note that I have two partitions ( / and /home) and my personal files and documents are on the /home partition. Is there a way to install 10.04 as a new install (not an upgrade) and tell it to use the old /home partition (ie not overwrite it with a new /home)? Also do people generally think it's a good idea to do an install from a cd instead of an upgrade through 8.04?

(On a related note, all software that I installed from source is located in /usr/local/src and ideally I would not want to overwrite that as well, but I'm guessing that since it's not on a separate partition that won't be possible?)

Thanks.

[snowpine]

The easiest way to upgrade (in my opinion) is by following these instructions:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade

This will keep all of your data, settings, and applications intact.

[elysianfields44]

The easiest way to upgrade (in my opinion) is by following these instructions:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade

This will keep all of your data, settings, and applications intact.

Thanks, I'm aware of that method. But what I was asking was: how does an install from cd differ from the upgrade method you suggested (is one or the other better in any way?) and how you would go about doing the install from cd by keeping a particular partition intact (say, out of curiosity).

Thanks anyway.