Upgrading question

[Konstantinos Togias]

Hi all,

I have a production desktop PC that runs Ububntu Breezy 5.10 . My last
clean installation was more than a year ago with Ubuntu Hoary. I Then
upadated to Breezy by changing the sources.list and perforning
dist-upgrade.

Using the pc in a daily basis I have made a lot of customizations and
installations of programs, services etc. I have installed Automatix, I
have a Firefox 1.5 installation at /opt/, I also have compiled and
installed from source some programs and daemons (lirc, mplayer,
gparted).

As Dapper will be released in June, I will upgrade to it sooner or
later. So I am wondering:

What is preferable: To just dist-upgrade from my breezy, or to do a
clean install??

On one hand I want to keep my configuration. It will be a furstration
to have to install and configure all those programs that are not in
the standard installation (I use apache,php,mysql,lirc,have configured
my tvtuner card, and a lot more that I cannot remember and that I will
realize that are missing when I find my self typing commands and
getting "command not found"). In order to avoid all this I incline to
the dist-upgrade method.

On the other hand, I am wondering if an installation of the new
packages on top of the old ones will have any bad effect to the
performance or the stability of the system. Eg. How will gnome 2.14
run using the configuration created by 2.10 and customized by me? Will
I have to manually find and delete the binaries at /opt/ and
/usr/local/ that may not work on the new system? Take into account
that the pc is quite old (A PIII at 450MHz) and I do not want to have
remainings and configurations inherited by the old system that just
slow down or have a negative effect to the stability of the machine.

So my final question is:
Is there anything that I have to win by doing a fresh install,
compared to just dist-upgradeing to Dapper? What do you suggest?

Thanks,

-- 
Konstantinos Togias
University Of Patras
Dept. of Mathematics