On Saturday, I got the notion in my head that “wouldn’t it be nice to upgrade and test out the next version of Ubuntu, ‘Edgy Eft’”. I do not reflect this experience on Ubuntu as a whole (with that I am quite pleased), but rather mainly the upgrade process.
The issues that I faced was that one of the gpg keys used to sign packages (the happened to be for the main repository) did not update properly, as such, major packages like KDM and my ethernet drivers would not work. So, having a Dapper live cd hanging around, I popped that in and decided to ask the IRC channel for help.
They did there best to help me un-hose my install. Lucky for me, I followed someones advice on the forums and separated my home partition from the root partition. This meant that I could go the only route to fix my upgrade, that is to download the edgy installer cd and do a fresh install. Thanks to the factor above, I have lost none of my personal data and now have a clean and fresh edgy install.
Something that really impressed me during the reinstalling was the ability to set my home partition as /home right in the installer. I did not have to edit /etc/fstab by hand to get Kubuntu to recognize that that partition is what /home should be.
All in all, though the upgrade did not go as planned, the general outcome of this was infact positive. The only thing I would stress about doing a fresh install, especially if it is your first one, is have a separate home partition. It will make your life so much nicer if anything gets fubar’d.