If you're on 14.04 there's no burning need to upgrade...it's supported until 2019.
I'm running Ubuntu MATE on my main laptop now and Lubuntu on some of my older hardware like an old netbook.
I could run "stock" Ubuntu but I've never really liked the "Unity" desktop interface...prefer MATE, which is "lighter weight" and is based on the old Gnome 2.
I updated the computer I have connected to my TV from Ubuntu MATE 15.10 to 16.04 LTS.
The upgrade was 99.99% flawless.
The only little tiny thing I found is that in my streaming radio application, the few stations that still make use of Windows Media audio format weren't working. So, I'll have to re-install or upgrade the audio codecs. Most radio streams use MP3, AAC or OGG these days....so a really teeny issue.
If 14.04 supported up until 2019, then I'll probably hold off on upgrading. Why fix something that isn't broken?
Yeah, I don't care for the Unity interface either. I do have Ubuntu installed on my laptop (which is an older laptop), since that was the only OS I had on hand at the time (well, I also had CrunchBang, which was kinda interesting, but I went with Ubuntu). I did install XFCE on it though, and that is the desktop I use. I prefer it, and media plays better on it.
ETA: I've not heard of MATE before. I'll have to look into it.
If 14.04 supported up until 2019, then I'll probably hold off on upgrading. Why fix something that isn't broken?
The only reason would be because there are might be some newer versions of application software in the 16.04 LTS repositories. But then, you can always add PPA's to your 14.04 LTS for anything that you're interested in. That's what I've done with Ubuntu MATE 14.04
ETA: I've not heard of MATE before. I'll have to look into it.
The MATE desktop is built on the old Gnome 2 desktop and is one of the two default desktops used by the Linux Mint project (the other being Cinammon).
What happened was that the Gnome Foundation was busy with building Gnome 3, but many people quite liked the old Gnome 2 and so they had "an itch to scratch" and built MATE. The beauty of libre software, is that if you don't like something, you can change it.
A volunteer group I'm involved with that rebuilds old computers...usually Pentium IV's and early Core 2 Duo vintage machines with 2 GB RAM, installs the Linux Mint MATE version on all the machines.
Just last night I installed Bodhi Linux on an old 2.5 GHz. Pentium IV with 1 GB RAM. Bodhi uses the "Moksha" desktop...which is also a "fork" of the lightweight "Enlightenment" desktop user interface.
Bodhi is built on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, so access to all the same package repositories as Ubuntu.
The maximum RAM the motherboard in this machine will take is 1 GB. If I could put 2 GB in, it would be much better. Bodhi installs the Midori browser by default...and although you can easily install Firefox, Chromium etc., they both kind of chew up a fair bit of RAM and so if you have more than a couple of browser tabs open it kind of crawls.
But everything else seems to work fine. Libre Office runs fine. Gimp runs fine. Haven't tried any video on it yet, but I expect it won't be great because of the hardware limitations.
Anyway, it's going to be a "give away" machine to whoever says they want it and will pick it up and take it away.
My "fun" is just getting it back in functional form...and liberating it from Microsoft 
Just to add...if anyone wants this "box", just PM me.
2.5 GHz. Pentium IV, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, onboard video chip, CD Burner, DVD-RAM drive, Bodhi Linux 3.2 and loaded with libre software to do just about anything you might want to do.
Pick up in Toronto.
If 14.04 supported up until 2019, then I'll probably hold off on upgrading. Why fix something that isn't broken?
The only reason would be because there are might be some newer versions of application software in the 16.04 LTS repositories.
Yeah, I don't need the newest of new, but I figured I'd go ahead anyway. However, I discovered that the option for upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 via the "software-updater" won't be available for another three months. From the release notes:
14.04 LTS to LTS upgrades will be enabled with the 16.04.1 LTS point release, in approximately 3 months time.
So, I'll simply wait. Otherwise if I were to do it now I'd have to do it manually via changing the sources.list(s), and thus I figure I'd have to do the upgrade incrementally via each release rather than all at once, which would be a pain.
Then I'd wait it out. There's no burning need for you to upgrade.
There are still plenty of folks still on 12.04, which still has a year to run on it.
I posted my Bodhi Linux box on my FB feed...still no takers believe it or not. Want to move on to my next give away machine. Have a basement full of non-functional computers and spare parts that I want to get rid of.
Then I'd wait it out. There's no burning need for you to upgrade.There are still plenty of folks still on 12.04, which still has a year to run on it.
Yup.
By june / july the "free" upgrade to GWX may expire -- maybe that annoying icon might stop blinking. You can click the no notification option buried somewhere but it keeps on notifying. Amongst many other annoyances of this decades old annoyance of a corporate operating system that gets installed by default on just about every PC you might want to acquire, I think it is time that I install the upgrade that I really want: Linux desktop.
I am looking at Ubuntu because it seems to be the easiest to install, but I don't like the bloat of it, and all the little annoyances that come with Ubuntu: Gnome3, sign up for this and that -- no thanks. I'd prefer a very minimal Linux (desktop) system. Although bloated, Ubuntu 16 seems like a start for now. Once, I've got Ubuntu side by side with Windows, hopefully I can add another Linux distro to the boot menu. Something like XFCE looks like what I want.
By june / july the "free" upgrade to GWX may expire -- maybe that annoying icon might stop blinking. You can click the no notification option buried somewhere but it keeps on notifying. Amongst many other annoyances of this decades old annoyance of a corporate operating system that gets installed by default on just about every PC you might want to acquire, I think it is time that I install the upgrade that I really want: Linux desktop.
I am looking at Ubuntu because it seems to be the easiest to install, but I don't like the bloat of it, and all the little annoyances that come with Ubuntu: Gnome3, sign up for this and that -- no thanks. I'd prefer a very minimal Linux (desktop) system. Although bloated, Ubuntu 16 seems like a start for now. Once, I've got Ubuntu side by side with Windows, hopefully I can add another Linux distro to the boot menu. Something like XFCE looks like what I want.
..have a look at solydx out of the neatherlands. i started using this maybe 5 years ago when i was using an old comp. after i got a new tried other linux distros but was disatisfied. i switched back to solydx (xfce) and it is now my permanent distro. it's a debian rolling distro so never expires and change comes from updates that are regular. good support form as well.
By june / july the "free" upgrade to GWX may expire -- maybe that annoying icon might stop blinking. You can click the no notification option buried somewhere but it keeps on notifying. Amongst many other annoyances of this decades old annoyance of a corporate operating system that gets installed by default on just about every PC you might want to acquire, I think it is time that I install the upgrade that I really want: Linux desktop.
I am looking at Ubuntu because it seems to be the easiest to install, but I don't like the bloat of it, and all the little annoyances that come with Ubuntu: Gnome3, sign up for this and that -- no thanks. I'd prefer a very minimal Linux (desktop) system. Although bloated, Ubuntu 16 seems like a start for now. Once, I've got Ubuntu side by side with Windows, hopefully I can add another Linux distro to the boot menu. Something like XFCE looks like what I want.
..have a look at solydx out of the norway i believe. i started using this maybe 5 years ago when i was using an old comp. after i got a new tried other linux distros but was disatisfied. i switched back to solydx (xfce) and it is now my permanent distro. it's a debian rolling distro so never expires and change comes from updates that are regular. good support form as well.
I do have SolydX running on an older Thinkpad laptop...the Thinkpad only has 1 GB RAM and the XFCE desktop is pushing it a bit for this little RAM...with 2 GB it would probably be a little better. SolydX IIRC comes out of the Netherlands.
SolydX evolved out of Linux Mint Debian Edition (as opposed to the Ubuntu based versions of Linux Mint). The LMDE team decided to stop working on the XFCE and KDE versions, to concentrate on the MATE and Cinammon desktop versions of LMDE.
So, some folks "had an itch to scratch" so to speak and picked up the project with SolydX and SolydK.
SolydXK and LMDE as I understand are "semi-rolling releases"...not quite the "true rolling release" of a distro like Arch Linux.
So you can continually upgrade forever, but they put a little more time into making sure things are stable before issuing updates.
With Arch Linux, they push out the very latest updates very quickly, but the assumption with Arch Linux is that if you're worried about something "breaking" then you shouldn't be using it.
"The semi rolling release" idea is a bit of a compromise between the "fixed" releases and the true "rolling releases".
In any case, nothing has "broken" yet on my SolydX machine.
If you want to stick with a Ubuntu based distro, Ubuntu MATE is a pretty good choice. I'm running it on the machine I'm using right now. It's just about as lightweight as Xubuntu...or anything else running an XFCE desktop.
For something "truly lightweight", but, kind of "ugly", I am running Debian with JWM (Joe's Window Manager) on my old original Asus EeePC netbook. It only has a 900 MHZ. Celeron processor and 512 MB RAM of which 8 MB is used for the onboard video chip...so in reality only 504 MB RAM ... plus a little 4 GB solid state drive.
I essentially use this netbook as an internet radio and podcast receiver using a little Python based programme called "Radio Tray" for streaming radio stations and "Clementine" for streaming podcasts.
Getting the Debian/JWM installation to work properly the way I wanted wasn't exactly easy, but with a bit of time I did manage to figure it out and learned a little more about various config files in the process. So it was a bit of a technical challenge for me.
..txs for the info radiorahim. i have solydx on an older thinkpad laptop as well. works great and very stable.
The Bodhi Linux box found a new home...a Windows user who got totally pissed off at a software upgrade that resulted in the audio tags being wiped from his collection of ripped classical music CD's.
So, I'm on to the next computer from the basement that will head out the door.
Very good! Glad to hear it.
If anyone is interested in moving outside of the Debian/Ubuntu based distro orbit, I've been hearing good things about Antergos
Antergos comes from Spain and started out as the Cinnarch project...combining Arch Linux with the Cinnamon desktop user interface.
Antergos now uses the Gnome 3 desktop as default, but I understand you can install other desktops if you want/need to.
Arch Linux is pretty difficult as I understand to get up and running...and keep up and running. Antergos simplifies all of the Arch stuff and like Arch, is a "rolling release".
This is the cool thing about moving to libre software. You have choices as to the version of GNU/Linux you want to use. You can choose based on your technical abilities (or lack thereof), the age of your computer hardware, the type of desktop user interface you want, and how "bleeding edge" you want your application software to be.
Just today the "software-updater" of Ubuntu let me know that a new version of LTS is available. So I now can do an upgrade from 14.04 directly to 16.04 if I wish. Not sure if I will now, though.
My experience with these updates is that they normally go relatively smoothly. The closer your current installation is to a "stock" install, the easier the upgrade goes.
At worst, I've exprienced some small inconsequential error messages after the upgrade.
But of course, like anything...before making the change, just to be safe do a complete backup of any personal data i.e. your "home" folder. Backups are always a good idea!
Of course the other idea being used by certain GNU/Linux distributions is the "rolling release" idea...where there is no "big upgrade" every few years, but rather, you are perpetually in a state of upgrading and so you are always up-to-date. There is no "new version".
That's the idea behind Arch Linux and distributions based on it. I'm running Antergos with the XFCE desktop on one of my machines. Of course Arch Linux is definitely not for a beginner. Antergos is sort of "Arch Linux with training wheels".
The nice thing about a rolling release is that absolutely everything is the latest and greatest version. The drawback is that something might break due to inadequate testing.
Another approach that's sort of in between the two is the "semi rolling release" used by Linux Mint Debian Edition and SolydXK. The "latest and greatest" software packages are held back a little longer to allow for more testing. I've had some good luck with SolydX so far.
I considered Arch, but ended up not going with it. I think at the time I was running a web server, and decided that a rolling release wouldn't be a good idea. Plus Arch is a bit tricky to set up. Antergos sounds interesting. I'll have to check it out someday. ETA: I checked out the site. It doesn't seem to have many packages. Can Arch packages be installed on it? Note: in asking I'm assuming some sort of package management system like many other distros have, though perhaps that's not the case.
You can use the AUR (Arch User Repository) to install stuff on Antergos (or anything else Arch based). Antergos pulls some stuff from it's own repos and some stuff from the Arch repos. Just one caveat, I wouldn't use the MATE desktop on Antergos. I tried it and it was a little buggy still. So I installed XFCE and it works fine.
Arch uses "Pacman" the same way Debian and Ubuntu based distros use apt-get for package management.
I'm still on a learning curve working with Arch based stuff, but one little observation that I very much liked is that software intalls/updates with Arch seem much faster than with Debian or Ubuntu based distros.
My "test" Antegos machine is a Core2 Duo with onboard Intel Graphics and 4 GB RAM. A bit older but quite serviceable desktop machine.
I wouldn't be all that comfortable using Arch for a web server. Would stick to Ubuntu Server, Debian or CentOS. If I were more skilled with Arch and the site wasn't all that important I might try it.
Well, I did finally upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 from 14.10, and it went well. At one point the install seemed to stick for a painfully long time, which made me nervous, but it did finally pull through. I use XFCE, so the small glitch was that xfce4-mixer is no longer present, meaning I had to find another volume control for the top panel. This took awhile, as I kept searching for the word "mixer" in the hopes of finding something, when the replacement turned out to be "xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin". Also, initially it looked like acroread (adobereader-enu, actually) was not working after the upgrade. It was something I had difficulties setting up before, and did not look forward to re-encountering those difficulties again. However, it just wasn't working from the main menu link, for some reason, but it did work when I ran "acroread" from the command line, which also seemed to fix the main menu link. Oh, and emelfm, an ancient file manager that I took pains to set up on Ubuntu 14.10, still works. So, all is good. Mind you, there's some appearance things that I'm going to have to get used to, but that's typical on an upgrade, I feel.
Good that it went well. Someone else I know recently upgraded Lubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 and had some small issues with suspend when closing the lid on their laptop. Not that big a deal.
Using Adobe's proprietary PDF reader on GNU/Linux is generally not recommended for security reasons. I think it's back on Version 9 and Adobe isn't supporting it anymore.
Better to use a libre software PDF reader like Evince. Besides, all of the libre software PDF readers open PDF's a whole lot quicker than Adobe. When I have to use it at work I find it painfully slow.
The only real reason to install Adobe Reader is for those occasional times where you run into proprietary PDF's ... mostly web forms. For everything else, it's best to use something else.
99% of the time I use Evince. But some of the interactive PDFs do require Adobe's reader.
Part of the problem is governments and public institutions providing taxpayer funded advertising for Adobe Software.
If you are told you "need" Adobe Reader in order to work with PDF's then it encourages people and organizations to create proprietary PDF's.
The Free Software Foundation in Europe (FSFE) has been documenting taxpayer funded Adobe advertising and has been engaged in a small online campaign with public institutions to get them to stop doing this...or to at least provide links to free libre PDF readers.
They've a little bit of success so far. It's a huge uphill climb.
I remember Toronto's Housing Connections (housingconnections.ca) had an online application form years ago that required Internet Explorer. It would not work with Firefox or any other free alternative. Perhaps the application form was using ActiveX or some other dangerous alternatives that were present back then for interactive forms, I dunno. But it was annoying that those using Linux couldn't use this form. The form now does allow for either Firefox or Chrome along with Internet Explorer.
Ontario's MPAC (Municipal Property Assessment Corporation) used to have a site like that too because they used ActiveX and Microsoft Silverlight on parts of their site.
Internet Explorer only websites have thankfully for the most part become a thing of the past. Although I did recently see an online typing tutor website that was IE-only.
More often these days, you'll find websites that won't work properly with Internet Explorer.
The next thing I'd like to see abolished from the web is Flash Player.
There was some talk about HTML5 as a replacement for flash, but I don't hear of that much recently.
There was some talk about HTML5 as a replacement for flash, but I don't hear of that much recently.
That's gradually happening. For instance you don't need Flashplayer for Youtube or Vimeo.
Canadian private TV stations still use it to stream video.
But I suppose the last folks to abandon Flash will be the folks who create those irritating pop up video ads.
The next thing I'd like to see abolished from the web is Flash Player.
Yes, I've been hoping Flash Player would go away for many many years now. I am using a Linux Desktop but for my purposes I have had to install Google Chrome / Chromium which will run Flash. Sadly, even today I still need to be able to run the latest version of Flash. 
There are a lot of unknown / unwanted software dependencies in this mix. I don't like Google Chrome because of all of the intrusions by Google in the software. Chromium, the open source version, is only slightly less Google-centric, but it runs a bit faster in my experience.
Other devices I use don't even have a usable version of Flash and they run just fine without it using HTML5. The demise of Flash is well underway. Sites like CBC might catch on to this in a decade of time. I remember that the CBC, amongst their many terrible technological decisions, insisted on requiring Real Player to watch their videos for the longest time before switching to Flash.
I've noticed that CBC online coverage of the Olympics has videos that require use of Chrome rather than a typical browser, since these are the type of videos that run ads beforehand (which, I've noticed, seems to only work with newer Flash versions -- newer than the last Linux version of, I think, 11.2.202.632). Running these videos on Chrome is painfully slow on my netbook, so I don't even bother. The majority of videos on CBC can be run using Firefox or whatever. The Olympics videos is the first time I've encountered this issue with CBC videos. But I can only see videos on CTV if I use Chrome (Chromium doesn't work for me for viewing these videos -- I believe the newer flash player is embedded in Chrome). Anyway, given this movement of including ads for online videos, I imagine business interests would want to stick to this.
Regarding desktops, generally I use XFCE, but sometimes I like Notion as well. Years ago, I used Ion3, which was a tiling desktop (window manager, actually) rather than the typical stacking (or I suppose "compositing", which, so far as I can tell, is just stacking on steroids) desktop. Notion is based on that. The guy who made Ion3 got pissed off with various Linux distros (particularly Debian) because he felt that when they packaged Ion3 that they made too many changes to it. He was a pretty interesting guy (Tuomov). He describes the idea behind Ion3 here (scroll down to see Ion (2000–2009)): http://tuomov.iki.fi/software/ I like it because it's minimal on resources, and sometimes I find that with stacking systems you can get lost in all the clutter. Anyway, Notion is a continuation of Ion3.
CBC has embraced Flash for many of it's sites despite the fact that the web community as a whole is working towards abandoning it.
To get current Flash content to work in Chromium, you have to install the "Pepper Flash" plugin for Chromium.
What most GNU/Linux package managers do is download Chrome, extract out the Pepper Flash plugin and then delete Chrome off your system.
There is a sort of work around to get the Pepper Flash plugin to work in Firefox. I played with it some months ago but was never able to get it working...I haven't really tried it since.
For those rare occasions where I have to deal with Flash I use Chromium.
Okay, good. I'll try Chromium with Pepper Flash. Hopefully I can get rid of Chrome.
Another stupid thing that CBC has done has to make it impossible to listen to the various CBC Music streams outside of the browser.
There used to be mp3 streams and at least one could listen to CBC Music using the media player of your choice.
They now break their audio streams up into "f4f" segments making it impossible (or at least I don't know how to do it) to listen without a browser. So...I just don't bother anymore. The kind of music content they have on CBC Music is for the most part available from a gazillion other public broadcasters around the world in external player friendly formats.
My favourite streaming radio player BTW is "Radio Tray". It's a simple application written in Python and is available from the software repo of just about every GNU/Linux distribution...certainly anything based on Ubuntu, Debian or Arch.
This programme is so small that it'll easily run on a Pentium II.
Good ol' python. Yes, I'll have to check out radio tray.
I did install Chromium, and then Pepper Flash. Pepper Flash downloaded Chrome, apparently, as part of its method for getting the new flash from it for Chromium. I already had Chrome installed, but no matter, I figure the Pepper Flash package knew what it was doing. Anyway, then I got rid of the Chrome that had been installed previously on my system (don't know about what Pepper Flash downloaded, though -- presumably that was gone after the flash from it was obtained -- I dunno). Anyway, Chromium does play videos from CTV and from the CBC olympic site. But, like it was on Chrome, it's very slow and choppy on my system. It's just too resource heavy for my old netbook. No matter. It's not something I need. I did finally get an antenna for my TV which gets CBC, so I can see the Olympics if the mood strikes me.
If it's a netbook, or pretty much anything with less than 2 GB RAM, it's going to choke on any kind of HD video...particularly flash.
On one desktop computer I used to have, the CPU fan would sound like a jet engine anytime I played Flash content. No problem with other types of video, just Flash.
You'll like Radio Tray...very low resource.
It stores all of your stations in a simple bookmarks.xml file that's located in /home/username/.local/share/radiotray/
So that make it easy to move you radio stream settings from computer to computer.
It comes pre-populated with a number of streaming radio stations...and then you can just add your own.
If you're looking for the "actual" stream of a station in a browser based player, in Firefox you just go to "Tools", "Web Developer" and then "Network", and then "re-load" the audio stream. Just hunt through the results, and you'll find the "real" audio stream. This works about 75% of the time. The actual stream URL can then be copied and pasted into Radio Tray.
It has 2GB of RAM and it works okay with most videos, but the newer flash over Chrome or Chromium is terrible. I did try Radio Tray. It's a good program.
To get current Flash content to work in Chromium, you have to install the "Pepper Flash" plugin for Chromium.
That's what I did, was install the "Pepper Flash" plugin for Chromium. The PC I am using says it has 3.7 GiB of memory and "Graphics" included in the Intel chip. HD videos can be a bit jerky until they get going. Video playback in Chrome (with PepperFlash) is terrible, so I use Chromium (with PepperFlash) to watch videos. I would recommend removing Chrome. I am also pretty happy using Firefox, especially on older / slower computers where I don't want or need to run Flash.
With an integrated graphics chip, video can be a little choppy at times.
These chips often "borrow" system RAM.
On much older systems with 1 GB RAM, I'd stay away from using Firefox due to memory usage and use something like Qupzilla.
Another fairly low resource browser that I've found has much improved is the Epiphany Browser from the Gnome Project. Epiphany is now based on the Webkit engine instead of Gecko.
Midori is pretty light as well but it crashes all the time.
Is Epiphany improved? Because years ago when I tried it it was terrible.
Yes, they now call it "Web" but it's still listed as Epiphany in most software repositories.
I agree, it used to be rather yukky. It's worth a look now I think.
Background info on Wikipedia here.
Thanks, just installed it. Yes, it's much better than I recall. Very minimal -- has just what is needed and no more. Also, while installing it, I discovered that I no longer need to type "apt-get". Instead, it was simply "apt install epiphany-browser". Very interesting. It gives a little progress bar update while installing stuff. Another exciting new command line discovery.
ETA: On Firefox, I have NoScript and AdBlockPlus installed. However, a lot of sites seem to sniff these addons out (particularly AdBlockPlus) and won't let me enter the site unless I turn AdBlockPlus off. On Epiphany, I enabled its internal adblocker (which works reasonably well) and I went to a site that wouldn't let me enter unless I had turned off AdBlockPlus, and it didn't object or notice Epiphany's adblocker. So, good stuff.
Cool! Hadn't heard of that one before!
Right now Facebook and Adblock Plus are locked in a very high profile cat and mouse online "war" with skirmishes happening every couple of days.
Facebook overrides Adblock, and then Adblock takes counter measures and the cycle goes on.
You may have found a work around :)
Yes tried it and it works.
Of course first make the changes to the ad settings and then close and re-open "Web" (Epiphany) with the new settings. If you don't the webkit engine seems to crash...or at least it did for me.
After that, seems to work fine! 
Excellent. Yes, I'll have to try Epiphany with Facebook. It'll be nice to see it without the ads.
To NoScript or not to NoScript:
I double-checked the site I was attempting to access yesterday (a Forbes site) and yeah, it did not catch the Epiphany adblock, which was effective on it. But regarding my attempts to access it using Firefox, even after I disabled both NoScript and AdBlockPlus on Firefox, I wasn't able to access the site due to NoScript still filtering a "potential cross-site (XSS) scripting attempt from forbes.com". That's the thing. I find having NoScript is a real time killer. Good to be secure, but there is a point where it just interferes too much with browsing. For a while I used to only access the net using TorBrowser, but it just became too much of a drain on me to do. I may toss NoScript from Firefox. And likely I'll just stick with Epiphany for the most part (which to my knowledge doesn't have the option to add NoScript anyway.)
NoScript is one of those trade-offs.
You get more security, but some sites are so loaded with trackers and cross-scripts that they're non-functional without them.
It's a matter of knowing there's an issue and finding the best balance that works for you.
The larger problem is that most folks don't even know there's an issue and take no protective measures at all.
I accidentally dropped my netbook, and later discovered that the hard drive no longer worked. So, I went to Above All Electronics on Bloor (south side, just east of Christie subway in Toronto) and asked the owner, Steve, to have a look at it. Yeah, it was the hard drive, but everything else was fine. So, for $20 bucks I got a new hard drive (60 GB) which he installed in the netbook.
Using an old LiveUSB drive, I downloaded the current Ubuntu, and then created a new LiveUSB with it, which I then installed on the netbook. Went well. Now, previously I had not backed up my computers before. I would just try to keep some important files on a disk or two (or CDrom) just in case, but never had an actual backup. However, given that Ubuntu has a backup utility, I did a couple of months ago run it just for something to try. And good thing I did. So, I had a backup of the entire /home directory, which was good. Very easy to do. In future I'll be sure to backup more frequently. Just seems a good thing to do.
I should note: Above All Electronics is heaven for those who like messing around with used electronics. Highly recommended.
