Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn, has just been released, so why not upgrade your machine.

To replace all your repositories, at the terminal:

sudo sed -e 's/edgy/feisty/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list

Note: You can likely also upgrade Dapper to Feisty beta. I have not tried this, directly. I have upgrade from Dapper to Edgy using this method before. So you could upgrade to Edgy first, or go straight to Feisty (if you are brave):

Now update:

sudo apt-get update

If you get any error messages, comment those lines out of /etc/apt/sources.list (make sure you sudo to edit the file). Certain repositories, such as automatix are not ready for Feisty yet.

Now upgrade:

sudo apt-get upgrade

You will be asked to keep certain configuration files, it is up to you (I am not responsible if you overwrite your perfectly crafted configuration files). I was only asked for a handful of packages. I may take a while to download and setup (several hours). You can likely let apt download for an hour or two, but then you should be around to answer the configuration questions. I haven’t noticed any problems just keeping the old versions…

One more command:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This command should be quicker than the plain upgrade, but will still likely take an hour.

You likely will have to restart your computer. You should run the update, upgrade, and dist-upgrade apt commands regularly. I have noticed that there are changes almost daily to the packages. You could add something like the following to your crontab. Make sure to get root’s crontab, via sudo crontab -e

0 4 * * * apt-get -y update && apt-get -y upgrade && apt-get -y dist-upgrade && apt-get -y clean

This will update your system every night.

Congratulations, you are running the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu.