Upgrading the HP ze4600 to Ubuntu 8.10

I got my hands on the HP ze4600 again and off I went to upgrade the Ubuntu installation to 8.10.

I have a friend who says he never bothers with the upgrade - he always just does a fresh install. I see his point, but I always hold out hope that the upgrade will be quicker and less painful. So now for my experience on the HP laptop.

Ran the upgrade and all went pretty smoothly. It wanted to overwrite my /boot/grub/menu.lst file, which I had modified to make Windows XP the first and default choice. I first tried to use the merge tool, but I couldn't figure it out. So I let the install overwrite it. Of course when the computer rebooted at the end of the install, windows was no longer a choice. No problem - the old menu.lst file was saved with an obvious filename, copied the Windows XP lines back into the current file, and problem solved.

The unexpected happy news...WiFi suddenly started to work!! I had never been able to get it to recognize the Broadcom 4306 rev 2 chip. Now it immediately recognized the proprietary hardware with the b43 module (or something like that - will grab a screenshot next time I'm allowed on the computer).