Taking the plunge into intrepid ibex

I have a memory like a sieve, and constantly find myself googling for solutions to problems I have previously solved. So I decided to start a blog when I manage something I know I'll forget.

Today I am moving my laptop os from ubuntu hardy over to ubuntu intrepid, so there's never going to be a better time to begin?

My laptop is an Advent 9112 - bought early 2008.
Like most users I have a love/hate relationship with this machine.

setup with 4 primary partitions on it's 150GB drive.
rough allocations are
/dev/sda4 ext3 /home 100GB
/dev/sda1 ext3 / 22GB
/dev/sda3 ext3 not mounted 22GB
and the rest is swap

on sda3 I have ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron) 64 bit - my main OS for 5 whole months!
on sda1 I have ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid ibex) 64 bit alpha 5, updated to wherever this release is today (beta 1?)

today, I finally decided that the intrepid is to become my main OS, so I have added "neil" as a user, and am currently migrating all my settings.

clearly it would be easier and maybe wiser to wait for a "dist upgrade" on the sda3 OS, but I am impatient for a couple of reasons.
1. intrepid appears to handle my wireless card much better than gutsy. Using WICD 1.5.3 the network connection is good enough for mythtv viewing - not the case on this machine since I moved to the 64 bit version of 8.04 (therein lies another story).
2. why the hell not? This machine has nothing critical on it.

One thing I love about linux is the consistency of design where settings and data are stored in the users home folder. firefox (and all it's plugins) pan newsreader, pidgin, xchat, thunderbird etc all moved accross seemlessly.
So too did all my desktop settings.

I do some web development, so I needed
#apt-get install apache2
and of course the settings for apache2 are buried within the system so I mounted the SDA3 partition and did
#sudo cp -av /media/disk/etc/apache2/ /etc/apache2/
#sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
and instantly my local sites are all working as before - hurrah.

now I need to remember how to get sudo to play ball with the scripts in my ~/bin directory which require root permissions to work.
when I do... I'm gonna blog it here, lest I forget again.

BTW - when SDA3 is redundant... I'm going to put arch linux on it, see what all the fuss is about.

Neil.