Smooth upgrade from Dapper to Edgy on my desktop

Yesterday I've updated OS on my desktop computer.

It's quite old PIII celeron 800MHz with nvidia geforce MX2. OS installed was Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake. Install was almost clean one, with minor tweeking (installed acrobat reader, SUN java, mplayer and few other packages).

I've followed several guides. For pre-upgrade instructions I went with this one: before-upgrading-to-edgy
For installation I went with instructions (command line ones) from here: upgrade-ubuntu-606-dapper-drake-to-ubuntu-10-edgy-eft but I used aptitude instead of apt-get.

Official instructions: EdgyUpgrades
Common problems with solutions: ubuntu-edgy-upgrade-common-problems-with-solutions

So basically it would go like this:

1. Check if ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-destktop packages are installed.
2. Check which packages were installed by hand and if they are probable to cause problems (use common sense ;))
3. Remove apps that were installed via "make install" and so on (once again use common sense ;))
   
4. Edit sources list, and replace dapper with edgy: sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
5. sudo aptitude update
6. sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
• Repeat this step until all problems are solved... I had to run it at least four times :)
  
7. sudo aptitude -f install
8. sudo dpkg –configure -a
9. Reboot the computer

Everything went fine. After the reboot I had running Edgy Eft :D.
So now it's time to install Beryl and show off to my friends that wait for Vista ;).
And then do the same with my laptop. This one will be harder as this install is heavily customized...

Google calendar

For some time now I've been playing with Google Calendar.
As other google products it has nice very intuitive interface, and of course is still in BETA ;).

At first I've found this calendar to be not very useful, apart from it's notification feature. Unfortunately for it to work your web browser must be running and you have to be logged onto google calendar. Moreover it's not very visible...

Recently my fiancée started to use google calendar. And then I realized that it became quite useful. I've subscribed to her calendar and Kasia subscribed to mine. Now I don't have to remember when she has her classes and so on. I always can look it up :D.

It has a lot more features that ease up making appointments with other people. But up to now I haven't had a chance to try them out :/

Today as you probably noticed I added my two calendars to my blog. So now everyone who's interested can check when I'm available... Of course I don't put all my appointments into this calendar ;)

Blogger beta

Today I decided to dust my blogger account. When I created it I was simply reviewing options...

At that time I found blogger very interesting but it lacked several options I needed, most of all:

• Restricting access to my postings (Actually it was possible - as blogger supported hosting blogs on other servers. If one happened to have access to www server and possibility there to restrict access, this would work.)
• Possibility to upload various files

After reviewing what was available I decided to host my own blog using serendipity (using my institutes web server ]:->). Actually I was mainly using it as logbook for my PhD. And after some time it became apparent that s9y was not the best option for the job.

• Uploading large files was a pain.
• Managing large collection of uploaded files was a pain.
• I got a lot of spam in the comments. And actually I didn't need comments... (turned them off altogether eventually)
  
• I found myself lacking time to play with vast features of s9y

So I did my research once again. And once again reviewed elog. This time I was convinced that it was the right tool. So I moved with my PhD logbook to it. After few moth I must admit it's great. It's very simple, not intrusive and lets me do my job quickly. Handles large attachments very well, has great permission control and it's very easy to create cross references.

There was no more point in keeping my personal blog on my institute server. So to gave myself a little breather from the work, I decided to check if I still remember my blogger login and password :-). Ideed I had :-D.

So after some playing with it I noticed a button that allowed me to upgrade to beta ]:-D. I pushed it without hesitation.

I must say that I hoped for a bit more changes. But it's great anyway. Possibility to restrict access to the whole blog is not as good as per post or per group settings but will be enough. If I'll need to restrict something I'll just create a new blog ;-). Though I wonder if there is possibility to display several blogger blogs on one page... Will have to check that one out someday...

There is of course dynamic posting. No more need to rebuild a whole blog to change one thing. Everything is now read from database in real time. Yay Google ;-)

Also new incarnation of templates editing is quite promising. I haven't noticed anything else worthwhile but surely I was not looking deep enough :-D.

I hope I'm here to stay, and I'll post something from time to time.

First Post

This is my first post :)