Which OS do you plan to run? I'd strongly suggest running 12.04, an LTS release. It seems this user prefers long support cycles and 12.04 will be supported/patched until Apr 2017. All the other releases will have 9-14 month support cycles. I would NOT recommend any of the newer releases for 95% of end-users. 12.10 and 13.04 are NOT LTS releases, so only people that have specific feature needs from those releases should consider them. Newer is not always better, after all.
So, first, I'd run the LiveCD of the target release to ensure it "likes" his hardware. Don't install it until the major items like networking, GPU, monitor, audio are all proven to work.
To upgrade or do a fresh install? That is a tough question. With Ubuntu, non-LTS releases only update to the next release, so you'd need to do 2 updates from 11.04 to 11.10 to 12.04 at a minimum. With 12.04, the way that networking is configured changed. /etc/resolv.conf isn't used directly anymore. I think your preferred distros did that change too.
If there isn't much customization, I'd recommend a fresh install. If there is lots of local changes, I suppose that I'd risk the release-upgrade churn. Only you can answer that. If you do the release-upgrade process, be 100% patched before you try to do it. Run
Code:
* sudo apt-get update
* sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
a few times to be certain you are on the latest libraries and kernel for each major release. Yes - "dist-upgrade" is the correct command. It will update within the same major release ... 11.10.1 to 11.10.2 .... you get the idea. It does NOT do the 11.10 to 12.04 updates.
The more I think about this, the more I'd try the do-release-upgrade processes and if anything fails, I'd fall back to the wipe and fresh install method.
Good luck!
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