After seeing this announcement for the Edgy Eft RC1 release, I decided to upgrade my Dapper laptop to Edgy. Thanks to the NZ mirror already being up to date, it didn’t take long to download the 700MB of packages that I needed.
I’d like to say the upgrade went smoothly, but it didn’t. Part of that is my own fault – I accidentally used apt-get instead of aptitude to handle the upgrade, and so a lot of packages were missed, and some dependency resolution was fumbled which meant the upgrade process broke hard along the way.
After manually removing a bunch of packages then getting the upgrade to restart, then repeating “aptitude dist-upgrade” about 6 times after it thought it’d finished, each time installing a couple of new packages, and then finally rebooting one more time because I couldn’t get X to start again, it all looked good.
Except that when I logged in, GNOME didn’t appear to start. I killed X and added a new user, then logged in as them – worked fine. Tried my user – no go. I spent a long time trying to move various GNOME configs out of the way, and eventually resorted to creating a new blank homedir for myself – still wouldn’t work. So I rebooted one more time and it started working after that. Very strange.
I’d suggest waiting for the final release to upgrade, but if you do go ahead, make absolutely sure you use aptitude and not apt-get. It may also work better if you use the CD and boot into an upgrade mode, I can’t comment.
I would file a bug, but I’m not sure it’ll help. I can’t pin down what was wrong because I used the wrong tool to upgrade. I have a Dapper install on my desktop at home, and I’ll try upgrading that next week when I get some free time, however it’ll probably “just work” by then anyway.
New things noticed in Edgy Eft so far:
- Firefox 2
- Network-manager-applet has a dialup account plugin.
Yeah. It looks the same. Edgy does have new features under the hood, but I haven’t looked into those yet.
Update: Yeah, it’s called Edgy Eft, not Efty Edge.