I've had the same problem! My Dell laptop needs
NDIS to connect to the web, and H/H won't store
the connection info, so the laptop's useless.

How do I revert back to Gibbon without wiping out
all my files ?

Hopefully you had a /home/?

If so, you can reinstall an OS, while keeping everything under /home/.
i.e. your Desktop, Firefox settings, downloads, etc.

Wow, it's looking more and more like 8.04 is Ubuntu's Vista! When I
first saw Vista, I could see that Linux had the door opened away from
Windows, but Ubuntu "upgrade" is stumbling badly here. Just like has
been said about MS, more and more Ubuntu users are going to "just say
NO" to "upgrades".

Not sure if Ubuntu prompts you on installation, requesting if you want
to keep all of the files in /home as MEPIS does on installation.

Yes, I have a 'Home' and that's where all the
stuff is I need to keep, so we're good.

Can I do this as a 'Rollback' from the repos,
or does Gibbon have to be re-installed from CD?

8.4 for so many has given no problems at all. with me on two computers
for one.

8.4 updates are flowing just fine also.

I've always had bad luck with upgrades of any kind with any OS. I
decided long ago to try to never do upgrades anymore. So now I back
up my data, wipe my drive and do a clean install. This may not work
for everyone but I think it tends to be the safest way. Even on the
famed OS X, I've heard of people having trouble after an upgrade,
where others using the exact same hardware had none after doing a
clean install. I'm not sure why, but it seems clean installs seem to
go better.

I agree, and also like that with Linux we can store all our settings
in /home and then reinstall an OS, without wiping those /home files
from our hard drives. Try doing that with a Windows reinstall. Windows
was always a pain to restore your Firefox and settings, bookmarks
etc., almost a game of musical chairs to find all the directories.

With the Linux file structure having a /home, it's not even scary to
test beta versions of Distros, as you won't have to bother restoring
your data between versions.

Perhaps for relative newbies like me someone could advise of a good
method they've devised for upgrades - every 6 months is quite
frequent! For bookmarks with winblows i used a portable version of
firefox allowing me to use my precious bookmarks on different
machines. I was a teacher and so had a lot of bookmarks for research
purposes, another i'm a hobby historian, and also a classic car
enthusiast, and also a considerable number of bookmarks on the IT
side.

With linux i've found the best method is to use Foxmarks... another
with google didn't seem to work so well.

I find foxmarks to be the best way to keep my bookmark data intact as
well. Now, I'd love a way to export or backup my thunderbird/pidgin
configurations as well.

However, a note of caution about keeping settings in your home directory
intact between upgrades using the 'clean install/restore' method.
Sometimes it is the settings in your home directory that cause the
problems. I always run a full gambit of tests on the system to make
sure it is working before I restore, that way, if it breaks after my
restore of /home I know it was something in there.

Regarding Thunderbird and Pidgin.

As with ubuntu one is doing a new install every 6 months - i reckoned
i was better off sticking to webmail [gmail is fast c.f. others] and
just using Thunderbird to download emails for archiving using the
ImportExport plugin once a year or so. To the best of my knowledge
Thundrbird is the only email client that offers that function... thus
the only one worth using IMHO. I do struggle with the view that
evolution is a good email client [maybe some good functions - ubuntu
documentation recommends that one installs Thunderbird in order to
convert from outlook to evolution!]

With gaim/Pidgin - i have dropped their use in favour of Meebo... it
saves chat which i copy to an .rtf file later.

You cannot do this unless you have /home on a separate partition. If you have
only one partition and everything is on that partition then you cannot save your
data. A new installation will wipe out your data. This is why it is advisable to
take the time to do a custom installation and create two partitions. One for /
and one for /home. Once this is done you will never have to worry about
re-installing and losing data again.

The situation is retrievable, if you want to go to the trouble of doing it. You
can use the Live CD to resize and create a new partition and then move your home
folder to that new partition. Then you can re-install Ubuntu to your old
partition and keep the data intact on the new partition. You can then just
change the mount points at the time of installation to reflect your changes.
Ubuntu will go on the old drive and the mount point will be / and home will go
on the new one and the mount point will be /home. You will want to format /, but
not /home.

If your installation is messed up you have nothing to lose. Just make back ups
in case.

Advice on this can be found here: http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/separatehome

Hopefully you had a /home/?

If so, you can reinstall an OS, while keeping everything under /home/.
i.e. your Desktop, Firefox settings, downloads, etc.

Wow, it's looking more and more like 8.04 is Ubuntu's Vista! When I
first saw Vista, I could see that Linux had the door opened away from
Windows, but Ubuntu "upgrade" is stumbling badly here. Just like has
been said about MS, more and more Ubuntu users are going to "just say
NO" to "upgrades".

Not sure if Ubuntu prompts you on installation, requesting if you want
to keep all of the files in /home as MEPIS does on installation.