“When I first praised Ubuntu, I wrote, ‘when the next Ubuntu
release .. comes out in six months’ time, upgrading to it should be
as painless as feeding new repositories to Apt and then typing sudo
apt-get dist-upgrade in a terminal window. The system will then
upgrade itself over the Internet. I can’t wait.’ Last week, when I
decided that it was time to replace Hoary with Breezy on the old
Thinkpad, I crossed my fingers and hoped that I hadn’t been too
naïve.“The magical apt-get incantation did its trick; I kept one eye
on the machine for several hours as updated package after updated
package was downloaded and installed. A new kernel, a new Gnome, a
new OpenOffice.org–it all flowed down through PC World’s fat pipe
from the rest of the Net. (Okay, the pipe’s not that fat, actually;
but it’s much faster than the DSL I have at home.) And when the
flow came to a stop, I rebooted and held my breath…”