Finally I have installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn!
But I have to admit that the journey was not exactly smooth.
Initially, as I do not have a really reliable connection, I have downloaded the Alternate CD and tried to execute the cdromupgrade script. However, I found that it needs gksu which it not installed. Trying to cheat it. I changed that to kdesu and it successfully launched the Distribution Upgrade tool, but quickly failed due to a bug I discovered in DistUpgradeViewKDE.py and I submitted a bug report.
Next, I tried a new attempt using the new Kubuntu Distribution upgrade tool as described here. But it failed during the "Modifying Software Channels" stage due to some gzip error.
After some googling, I found that I could modify the /etc/apt/source.list to point to mirrors instead of the official source at http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/. To my disappointment, there are no mirrors in Malaysia. So I looked for mirrors in Asia. As I thought Thailand would be the closest neighbor, I changed all references to http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu to http://mirror.in.th/ubuntu/archive/. Download speed was reasonably OK... about 60KBps but failed when installing a package called ttf-bengali-fonts and installation stalled after that. I closed the Distribution Upgrade tool and restarted the system to try again. But to my horror, Kubuntu failed to boot!
Luckily, I have a backup of the primary Kubuntu partition using Clonezilla tool. This time, I found this Official Archive Mirrors page to be better that the Ubuntu Wiki Mirrors page that is linked from Ubuntu download page. After a bit of testing using ping, tracepath and also download a small 1MB file. I discovered that Korea's KAIST is the fastest. Hence, I replaced all http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu in /etc/apt/source.list to http://kr.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ and I tried to launch the Distribution Upgrade tool using Adept again. But the error happened again when installing ttf-bengali-fonts. But this time, I tried an advice from ubuntu forums by trying executing a "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a" then followed by "sudo aptitude upgrade" before restarting. With my fingers crossed, Kubuntu Feisty was launched successfully! Yay!
After some testing around, everything seems fine. A quick check on the used space on the partition shows that it is about 3.7GB. Then I remembered that there was a final stage on the Distribution Upgrade tool for clean up. After a bit of browsing around the filesystem, I found that /var/cache/apt/archive has taken up 1GB. To clean that up, I did a "sudo apt-get clean" and that clears up the download packages and leaves me with 2.6GB of used space.
So, as you see, the journey was not too smooth but it works!
