It is April and Ubuntu 13.04 named Raring Ringtail has just been released a couple of days ago. Should you switch from an old version, or use it as an alternative to Windows 7? Well, that depends on your situation. Although the Raring Ringtail has a few new features, most of this is under the hood, and most differences between 12.10 and 13.04 are not noticeable immediately. It is also important to note that this version is only supported for 9 months from now, which means you will have to update again when 13.10 comes out. The alternative is to stay with 12.04 LTS, the long term support of 5 years.
Well, I cannot not install the latest version, because I am just too curious to see what the latest buzz is about, so this is how I updated from 12.10 to 13.04 on my Dell Inspiron 14z.
I took the following preparations in case something goes horribly wrong.
- Manual backup of my files onto an external hard drive.
- Sync all files with dropbox.
- Make a backup file with Deja Dup of the Home folder.
- Get a list of all installed software with :
- dpkg --get-selections > installed-software
- Make a bootable USB stick of 13.04 as a plan B.
- Export boomarks in firefox.
To update the system, I choose to use the software updater. I had not used it previously when updating from 12.04 LTS to 12.10, but thought I would try this time. As rumor online has it that using a clean install gives a better outcome, I prepared the bootable USB stick, but still wanted to go ahead with the software updater. It took about 1 hour to download all packages (crappy internet connection), and another 30 minutes to update everything and purge the system of old packages. After a restart, everything was updated, although so far I have not noticed any great changes, neither in speed (it was really fast before anyway) nor in appearance (a bit different, but pretty much the same).
