Advice needed on upgrading Edgy >HardyHeron

[Bernie_the_bolt]

I have been running Edgy Eft (386) for about 18 months now and feel it is time to upgrade to newer version.
Please advise, I understand I cannot upgrade directly from 6.10 to 8.04 and would have to to a fresh install. If I backup my home and etc folders will this save all my installed programs or will I need to re-install them ?
Another alternative would be to upgrade to each newer version in turn I guess.
My internet connection is an issue - I am dual booting with Xp and can access broadband via sky dsl satellite on xp but only dial-up with Ubuntu. because of this I am never up to date with updates. I plan to move the sky hardware to my wifes XP only machine, and network both so I can use her Pc as a server and access broadband from Ubuntu that way.
Any suggestions on easiest/best way to go ?

Asrock 939dualSATA mb (not sata HD at present)
AMD64 3500+
512k ram

[ajgreeny]

If I were you, I would start fresh with a clean install of 8.04, having first backed up all of my /home, and perhaps /etc. Now when you have a fresh install up and running you can chose whether or not you need to restore everything from your old /home, including all your configs in the hidden folders, and similarly all the stuff in /etc.

There are certain hidden folders definitely worth bringing over from the old /home such as the openoffice, mozilla, mozilla-thunderbird, purple (for pidgin) and skype folders, but often it is easiest to start clean and fresh with many of the other application configs. Just make sure you have everything backed up first, or you won't even have the choice of whether to restore the configs or not.