Upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 with the Alternate ISO

My laptop is an Asus EeePC 701. It's the first generation of modern netbooks and it sports the specs to prove it. Among the diminutive hardware is a tiny 4GB SSD hard drive and the base Ubuntu install takes up about 2/3 of the drive. The lack of hard drive space makes it impossible for me to do the upgrade via the Update Manager application bundled with Ubuntu.

The solution? Download the ISO to an external and upgrade directly from that!

Yep, it's that simple. Here's how:

1. Download the Alternate Install ISO (OSU mirror) to an external flash/hard drive.
2. Connect the external drive to your lappy and mount the ISO:

   sudo mount -o loop /media/external/ubuntu-10.04-alternate-i386.iso /media/cdrom0

3. Run the cdromupgrade script:

   gksu "sh /cdrom0/cdromupgrade"

I upgraded from 9.10 and the only thing I had to change was to move the 'Close', 'Minimize', and 'Maximize' buttons back to the right of the windows, which was also easily accomplished:

1. Open 'gconf-editor'
2. apps > metacity > general > button_layout = "menu:maximize,minimize,close"