Upgrade / Installation of Ubuntu 11.10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases#Table_of_versions

It's perfectly fine to stay with a current release if you wish - in particular the LTS versions like 10.04 Lucid are designed for long term use and are supported for three years in the Desktop release and five years in the server release. I normally recommend the LTS release to people unless there's hardware support in later releases that is not available in the LTS.

If you wish to upgrade to the next release through update manager you must update from one release to the next each time. The exception to this is that you can upgrade from one LTS release to the next one, so for example if you have 10.04 on your system you would be able to upgrade to 12.04 when it is released next year.

If you have to upgrade by more than one release, seriously consider downloading the LiveCD and re-installing to the latest version. It will be much quicker to do so, and probably give you less problems in the long run.

Regardless, unless you have a separate /home partition it's highly advisable to back up all of your important data before starting the upgrade. If for some reason the upgrade fails or your hardware is not compatible with the new release for some reason it can make recovery very difficult.

Chris

It's perfectly fine to stay with a current release if you wish - in particular the LTS versions like 10.04 Lucid are designed for long term use and are supported for three years in the Desktop release and five years in the server release. I normally recommend the LTS release to people unless there's hardware support in later releases that is not available in the LTS.

If you wish to upgrade to the next release through update manager you must update from one release to the next each time. The exception to this is that you can upgrade from one LTS release to the next one, so for example if you have 10.04 on your system you would be able to upgrade to 12.04 when it is released next year.

If you have to upgrade by more than one release, seriously consider downloading the LiveCD and re-installing to the latest version. It will be much quicker to do so, and probably give you less problems in the long run.

Regardless, unless you have a separate /home partition it's highly advisable to back up all of your important data before starting the upgrade. If for some reason the upgrade fails or your hardware is not compatible with the new release for some reason it can make recovery very difficult.

Chris