At the present time I’m trying to upgrade my Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 but the servers holding the files are getting slammed right now (first day of release – it’s expected).
You can upgrade your Ubuntu 100% from the internet just by clicking a few options and letting the update manager do its thing. See video below for details – it’s super-easy (but takes forever at present because everybody is trying to download it right now).
In Ubuntu you can’t use a torrent to run a direct upgrade, which downloads individual packages and installs them much like it does updates.
To do the upgrade, I pressed Alt-F2 and typed:
update-manager -d
This was at 9:30 this morning. Because the servers were swamped the download (1307 packages in my case) was pretty slow. That and installation took about three and a half hours.
As always, the upgrade lets you decide if you want new versions of some packages. That requires a little interaction. I had to re-enable a few software channels, reset my desktop wallpaper to full screen, and delete the old shutdown icon in the task bar (there’s a new and improved one) once it was all done. That’s it. Everything works fine.