[wellylug] Flash for Firefox

[Jim Cheetham]

On 11/09/2007, Persian <veganforlife at clear.net.nz> wrote:
> OK I just found it on a console it says Breezy Badger 5.10, why do I have
> to go to 6.04?

The Ubuntu upgrade policy has a concept of "supported upgrade". Your
version 5.10 is only supported for upgrade to 6.06, which is a "Long
Term Support" version and will continue to receive security support
for 5 years (as a server, IIRC it's only 3 for desktop components).

6.06 can upgrade to 7.04, and will probably be able to upgrade to 7.10
when that's released. It *should* also be able to upgrade directly to
8.04, which will be the next "Long Term Support" platform (but
obviously we're not sure if that's true yet!)

Basically, the number of changes between 5.04 and 7.04 are so large,
and the upgrade software on 5.04 is too inflexible to allow a direct
upgrade.

To reduce the amount of downloading you need to do, a direct
re-install of 7.04 would be good, but would of course overwrite your
existing OS and settings. Upgrades should retain all your settings,
but will be slower and cost more bandwidth.

If you are going to reinstall, and you are happy with some
instability, you could consider going straight to 7.10 beta -
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing . However while that is building up to
release there will be a huge amount of updates, and you'd probably
again use far too much bandwidth and time. Plus it isn't "free of
errors" yet :-) I'd say it would be fine as a workstation, as long as
your data was backed up well ...

And before you rely on your backups, make sure you know how to restore
data from them!

-jim