It's been more than 2 months since i upgraded my laptop to 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope', and about time to share the results with the rest of the world, the whole upgrading process took about 2 hours (8.04 LTS to 8.10 and then 8.10 to 9.04) but it was completelly painless and there wasn't much i had to do, i even went to the gym for the last hour of the process and when i came back the whole process was almost finished, hurray!!
Warning!! don't hold me responsible if after following my notes your system is messed up, my laptop is 100% Linux compatible and your hardware may not be, do this at your own risk.
First thing i did was update my 8.04 LTS, once my system was up to date i started the upgrading process to 8.10 (you can only upgrade to 9.04 from 8.10). Note that upgrades from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 are not enable by default because 8.04 is a long-term-support release and 8.10 is a regular release, but upgrade is 100% supported and easy to enable, if you are not sure which version you are currently running type on a terminal 'lsb_release -a' to find out.
Now go to System/Administration/Software Sources, then click on the "Updates" tab and change "Show new distribution release" to "Normal releases", now get outta there.
Again start System/Administration/Update Manager, click the Check button to check for new updates. If there are any updates to install, use the Install Updates button to install them, and press Check again after that is complete, make sure you have all the updates for your current version installed before upgrading, a message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release, click upgrade and follow the instructions on screen, the upgrade manager will then start downloading the necesary packages.
Depending on the speed of your Internet connection this can take just a few minutes to a few hours, once the necesary files are fetched you can sit back and watch it work, this may take a while too depending on your hardware speed.
Once this is done and you have restarted your system you can check again with 'sudo lbs_release-a' if the upgrade was succesful, then you should see the following on your terminal:
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu intrepid
Release 8.10
Codename Intrepid
Not as colorful as 'The most incredible and really unbelievable dream has become true: You compiled e17 successfully!' (Enlightenment fan here) but if you see this then you have succesfully upgraded to 8.10.
To upgrade to 9.04 the steps are pretty much the same, update your 8.10 and then proceed with the upgrade, it should be as easy (or even easier) than the previous upgrade.
Was it worth the upgrade? Hell yeah!! For example hibernating did't work that good with 8.04, now it works without a problem, from switching on until login screen takes about 20 sec, the overall impresion is very good and the new release works faster and efficient.
Before you attemp to do an upgrade, don't forget to backup your system and get as much information and feedback about other people's experiences about upgrading their systems, best place for this is of course the
Ubuntu Forum, good luck!! :-)
