I'm finally leaving the Ubuntu LTS, upgrading through the steps to 8.10 and 9.04

I always said I'd run the latest Ubuntu LTS, version 8.04 (standing for its debut month and year, April 2008) for about a year and then consider upgrading and again following the regular six-month release cycle for awhile.

That was before the developers of Xorg decided to make life hell for users of Intel video. Actually I've been feeling the pain in one form or another for well over a year now, back to the days when I couldn't seem to get rid of video artifacts in, first Debian Lenny in its Testing phase, and then Slackware, OpenBSD and just about everything else.

I finally figured out how to modify xorg.conf to get acceptable video in Lenny (now Stable) and just about everything else. And even though now EXA acceleration, which I've been using since I figured out that fix, is being done away with in favor of, is it UXA? ... I've still been reluctant to upgrade. But I do have some potential fixes that should help my Intel video-running laptop cope with the post-EXA era, and I have tested my previous fixes with Ubuntu 9.04 via the live CD.

So I'm confident that everything will work right in 9.04 and that I can deal with whatever Xorg throws at me in 9.10 when that is released next month.

In preparation for the upgrade, in which I'll be stepping up from 8.04 through 8.10 and then 9.04 (and eventually 9.10), I updated the backups of my user files last night.

And today I changed my software sources (System -- Administration -- Software Sources, then the "Updates" tab) in Ubuntu 8.04 from Long Term Support releases only to Normal releases). I received a notice somewhere along the way that some of my additional repositories would be turned off in the course of the upgrade. I made a mental note to check those (also in System -- Administration -- Software Sources, and if not, somewhere in the Synaptic Package Manager, or via the console in /etc/apt/sources.list) after the upgrade.

It's taking about an hour or so to download the 1,224 files needed to go from 8.04 to 8.10 on my particular installation, and I'm almost done, so I'll post again when I know more about how it's going.