After letting it download a few hundred megabytes and install everything I re-booted and ended up with a command line rather than the usual graphical log-in screen. It proved impossible to get either KDE or Gnome to run.
Luckily I could use another PC (running Windows 98) to access the web and search for solutions. Eventually I managed to fix it with a combination of apt-get -f install (to fix dependencies) and installing xfonts-base. So now I had my GUI back, but still had a few issues with size of fonts and complaints from the update process about a few packages. Running apt-get -f install again fixed the latter.
So after the upgrade what has changed? Actually not a whole lot. I'm still using KDE, so maybe Gnome has changed more. At least I can get straight to the address book in Kmail. It took a further update to get GPG working on mail.
My next areas to explore are video editing (still not done any) and audio recording. I want to record myself playing the guitar for my own amusement. Audacity looks like a possible tool for this.
