Package managers make life on Linux a whole lot easier. Instead of managing bits of software by yourself and sorting out the inevitable dependency hell, where one package depends upon another and that depends upon yet another and so on, you can have a clever bit of software do all the work.

Which path should you follow? Should you take advantage of Ubuntu's package manager and use it to upgrade your system to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron release, or should you download a CD or DVD ISO image and do a clean install? Common wisdom says that doing a clean install is the better, safer course of action. There may be a little extra work involved configuring everything once the latest and greatest is installed, but that's nothing compared to the pain of an update gone wrong, according to traditional thinking. But that cautious approach may no longer be necessary.

This guide shows how you can upgrade your desktop from Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron).

Ubuntu users, Firefox 3 beta 5 (3b5) has reached Hardy’s repositories. Gutsy (and older versions) users, enable Hardy repo’s to upgrade it.

To be able to install the extensions that are not supported by this version of firefox (since the new addons website interface which sucks by the way), here’s what you must do to bypass it:

http://icehot.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/firefox-3-beta-5-reached-hardys-repositories/

So just before the first beta I finally updated my production machine to Hardy after feeling bad about not giving enough effort in testing for the last weeks. In one short sentence: It worked! In a longer sentence: It worked quite well, but…

This is a fairly useful (and simple, but not very innovative) trick for older machines using Ubuntu, when your network connection might be weak, or when you have a lot of software to install and don’t want to wait on an old CDROM.

There are two dominant software projects that provide Linux with a graphical user interface, but only one of them will get long-term support in Ubuntu's next version of the open-source operating system.

This guide shows how you can upgrade your desktop from Ubuntu Studio 7.04 to Ubuntu Studio 7.10.

It was pointed out to me this morning that my previous Ubuntu upgrade instructions did not include upgrading Ubuntu Server. I thought I’d take a second and type those up as well. They are pretty simple (as all of the upgrade options intend to be), so you really shouldn’t need to do much.

I wanted to outline instructions on how to upgrade from Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 7.10. The upgrade steps try to be very user friendly and can be done without any manual “command line trickery”. Upgrading using these methods are only supported for machines currently running Ubuntu 7.04.

Many of you know that I’ve been running and testing Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” since early in the alpha stage. There have been no show stoppers and its been fun to see the development continue to happen, and be able to contribute to that by submitting bugs.

If you are having the error while trying to upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon, this can help you.
The error: current dist not found in meta-release
The solucion:

Upgrading to Gutsy

One of the things in Ubuntu that has always driven me crazy is the addition of new items into the grub menu without removing the old entries that likely don't even work anymore.