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Yesterday, faced with the fact that my working environment of Ubuntu 8.10 was unsupported and getting no updates from the repositorties, I decided to see if another install that lives inside the Vista NTFS partition would upgrade cleanly. I figured that if it failed I could just delete the directory and reinstall using the bit-torrent available and would probably automatically get Ubuntu 10.something. So I booted into that install and selected 'upgrade' from the package updater which said it was going to upgrade the Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 10 LTS. In the bargin I would probably also get a version of Firefox that supports CSS3 better than the Firefox 3.0 in 8.10. I also installed Google Chrome and Emacs 23 to be sure the package add worked. I was quite pleasently surprised when the install which downloaded several thousand packages and a couple of hours worked flawlessly. I was able to mount my files and examine them just fine.
TopToday I went for broke and updated the Ubuntu 8.10 on my main working partiton to 9.04, after backing up my home directory to DVD. Again the worst that could happen is that I would have to do a reinstall and restore my files from the backups. As it turned out this install did well enough so that I got my system back. I had the problem with the Nvidia card driver not getting into the kernel from the GUI that is supposed to do that and the high res screens were not available to me. The fix is to go into the console and do 'sudo apt-get install linux-headers$(uname -r}' which installs the requested driver, then in the GUI enable the driver and do a cold reboot. The higher res screens will come back. I was able to reconstruct these steps from notes I kept as a result of a trouble ticket I had to open on 8.10 because the driver was blown away mysteriously.
The only other problem is that the install left about 6 GB of extra data on my drive, which has now 11 GB free and 20.45 GB used. I have a feeling that the packages that got updated were left on the disk, because that was the amount downloaded in the upgrade. It isn't clear to me whether this is how it is supposed to work and I don't know where the packages sit in the filesystem. I went on the Ubuntu Forums and did not find an answer.
TopThese upgrades installed Mozilla 3.6, which was the major goal of the whole effort, but I found that gradients come out quite odd. I think the reason is that I didn't edit the settings for the style for Mozilla, as I did for Chrome (-webkit), so I suspect that all I need to do is to change the -moz settings to match what I did for webkit.
I was able to fix these to some extant, but I did not get the exact look.
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