8.10 to 9.04 and beyond

[sansa90]

Will anything happen to my system if I upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04, as in data and document/app loss? also, what are the diferences between the two, other than some less buggy parts.:confused::confused::confused:

[quadproc]

Will anything happen to my system if I upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04, as in data and document/app loss? also, what are the diferences between the two, other than some less buggy parts.:confused::confused::confused:
About a year ago I had been running 8.10 and decided to switch to 9.04. I did it by installing a new system from the CD into its own partition. My old data remained in its original partition so when I wanted it, I mounted the old file system from the 8.10 partition and copied the data forward.

Since then, I moved all of my data to its own drive and partition; this greatly simplifies things such as backups and new release installations. But please be advised that it may take more than just a simple copy to move your data; for example, consider what happens when a file has multiple links to it.

Regarding the upgrade, if you are using any proprietary graphics drivers then you should uninstall these before the upgrade and then reinstall them after the upgrade is running. Failure to do this can result in anything from an occasionally buggy graphics system to a completely dead display. The latter makes troubleshooting very painful.

I believe that the biggest difference between 8.10 and 9.04 was X windows; the X folks dramatically changed the way that X works and you therefore must have graphics drivers which are compatible with the X windows version that is part of the Ubuntu release. The old driver for 8.10 cannot be used with later Ubuntu releases. It would be wise to check your graphics driver availability for the new version before you make the change.

I did find that 9.04 was less buggy and easier to use than 8.10. It also eliminated something that used to consume about 30% of one processor at all times.

quadproc