gdgt

Not entirely sure on upgrading from 8.04 to 9.10. But you shouldn't have any problems upgrading (as such). The community support forums are awesome if you do encounter problems.

Mostly upgrading the os is simple.

Information on upgrading from one to the next is here: www.ubuntu.com­/getubuntu­/upgrading

And upgrading from 8.04 to 9.10 is covered here: https:­/­/help.ubuntu.com­/community­/UpgradeNotes

If you want to stay with LTS (Long Term Support) releases, the next release 10.04 is due in five months or so... and upgrading from 8.04LTS to 10.04LTS is simple and convered in one of the above links.

Hope you enjoy Ubuntu.

If you've stuck with 8.04 this long, I would suggest waiting it out until 10.04 comes out - as it will have a lot of the current kinks worked out from 9.10... However, it's really up to you :)

What netbook are you getting? The reason I ask is they each have varying degrees of ease, some work right out of the box, others require a little tweaking after install (wireless, sound, mic, etc. ).

Also, if you buy with 8.04, I would just do a fresh install to 9.10 Netbook Remix. I don't think any netbooks ship with it, but the 9.10 iteration of UNR is really nice. It is no more difficult to do a clean install and you're less likely to have problems than with an upgrade.

I've been upgrading my Ubuntu boxes since Hardy Heron, and never had any problem until 9.10 came out. I've usually done in-place upgrades and never had a problem until this release. I upgraded my Thinkpad R52 from 9.04 to 9.10 using the update manager as I've always done in the past and after the final re-boot, I no longer had any sound playback and my trackpad was no longer recognized. Filed a bug report and noted many, many others had the same problem. Listened to the Fresh Ubuntu podcast a week later where this problem was addressed and Harlem recommended just doing a full install with the ISO file, and this solved all his problems. On my desktop (Athlon X2 CPU, Asus A8N5x motherboard), I did the full install on my 32 bit partition and had no trouble at all. Did the in-place upgrade on the 64-bit partition and likewise had no trouble. It just seemed to be a problem with the Thinkpad, which handled three earlier releases with no issues.

Consensus seems to be it is safer just to upgrade from the CD, rather than use the update manager on this one.

should it be a netbook, i would suggest Ubuntu Netbook Remix. the interface is just friendly and intuitive, more like a wide screen handset with everything useful built-in.
you may find the download link here : www.ubuntu.com­/getubuntu­/download­-netbook

for your information, if one is not sure which one Ubuntu he/she would like to install, just try the ISO first. leave the countdown alone and it will launch the Live CD interface.

I agree with what seems to be the consensus so far, if you have no data to lose just do a fresh install. The main issue you would be encountering is that Ubuntu's upgrade path requires you to do 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 ->9.10 (Although I think I recall that you could skip one of those, but that still requires two back-to-back upgrades, and I think a fresh install will just be faster.)