Gutsy dist-upgrade again - slow

My wife has finally finished (well, officially, of course there'll be support calls for a month or so) a lucrative software development project that is funding our immigration to New Zealand. She uses Kubuntu and she's at Feisty. I'd delayed upgrading her laptop so that there'd be no delays with her project.

With the project done, I've started the Gutsy upgrade. There's a bug with the Feisty restricted updates packages list. It's supposed to be .gz, but surfing to it shows that it's actually just a text file. so the first stage of the dist-upgrade fails because gzip tried to decompress the file and failed.

I didn't want to fight it, so I just removed restricted from apt-get/sources.list and restarted the dist-upgrade.

It then said that / was too small. So I cleared out /var/log/messages and since that didn't help enough, I also moved /usr/share to /home and linked /home/usr-share to /usr/share. Standard trick when I underestimate how large / should be :-). I'll move it back later when the dist-upgrade is done.

That's going to be *MUCH* later though. The packages are downloading, but at a glacial 11-20 kiloBITS per second. I'll crash now. A few hours after I wake up the downloads should be done and the upgrade can continue.

I've been sick today but I'm excited about finally upgrading her laptop, which is why I'm sitting t her computer right now, close to midnight. I'd wanted to install xdebug and protoeditor a few days ago but again, in the interest of stability, held off. When the upgrade is done, I'll install protoeditor and she'll finally be able to debug PHP programs in linux. *THAT's* really what I've been excited about. The upgrade is just a logical forward step to take before I get to install the debugger.

Protoeditor still has some bugs (mainly involving displaying some array entries). It's already very useful though. Just the ability to animate the flow of execution is a big deal (e.g., for figuring out incredibly bad legacy code, or incredibly good but complex code I wrote but don't understand anymore :-). Finding bugs is great too :-).