I installed the late beta of Ubuntu 4.10 this week. Here are my thoughts on the process and the product.
First of all, if you are not already keeping your home directory on a separate partition, I strongly recommend that you do. Once the install is done, everything looks pretty much like you had it before, including app preferences, look and feel, saved Firefox passwords, etc. It's nice not to have to reconfigure everything from scratch.
Second, upgrading was not an option, since I went from Mint back to Ubuntu. But the whole process took about two hours, and I really think a clean install is the way to go.
Third, strangely, I got no video on the install CD. I ended up downloading the text-based version and installed from there. And you know what? I actually prefer the text-based method.
Fourth, you MUST install Ubuntu Tweak if you haven't already. It instantly edits all sorts of obscure config files for you, making it simple to have a system that does exactly what you want it to do.
Fifth, I guess I'm getting smarter, or installing Ubuntu is getting easier. This was by far the smoothest experience I've ever had.
The initial boot had ugly graphics, but Ubuntu quickly arranged for me to use the proprietary Nvidia driver. I know some purists out there bristle at the thought of having to do that, but not me. I now have full Compiz effects, pretty impressive to me on a four-year-old machine.
I don't think I'll be upgrading any more on this box. This is a long-term release, and this sweet old system has earned the right to sail off into retirement with no further OS overhauls. I'm hoping that I'll be building my own power workstation from scratch before the end of summer.
I guess there's some uproar over the window buttons being moved to the left by default. Again, I wouldn't know about that, my desktop looks just like it did before I upgraded.
Oh, one last thing: you should make a list of apps you've added, and any non-standard panel applets you've installed. That will speed up the process of reinstalling them afterwards. You should also save /etc/fstab and grab the text from your crontab to make for quickly getting mapped drives and special processes back in business quickly.
And another advantage of keeping your home directory intact from the previous system is that Crossover Pro, if you are using it, comes back with no further action required on your part. Since it installs itself and everything it does in your home directory, there it sits, relay to go back to work for you when you boot into your new OS.
Lastly, this version of Ubuntu is the most stable yet. I had an issue with occasional X crashes with both 9.10 and Mint 8. Niot a single one since the upgrade.
So I recommend you give Lucid Lynx a spin. It looks like Ubuntu will just continue to get better and better!
Comments (2)
Good article! On the last release of Ubuntu 9.10, I partitioned a separate Windows partition (still using windows tax software) and when installing Ubuntu I created separate partitions for both Ubuntu and my home directory which used the encryped home directory feature that Ubuntu offered (Ubuntu 64 version as I have an intel quad core). As I will soon like to do a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 without disturbing the windows partiton or my home directory partition, I would be interested in obtaining procedural instructions which would facilitate this. Also, has grub been updated? If so, does the upgrade process, as described above, allow for the grub update or would that be manually done? Any links you might suggest would be helpful, perhaps I am not googling the right things. Thanks.
Posted by Hans Jahr | April 29, 2010 12:18 PM
Posted on April 29, 2010 12:18
You'll have to choose the manually set partitions option. Delete the existing / and /boot partitions, if they are separate. Select your current /home partition as your new /home, and make sure you tell Ubuntu *not* to format it. Your Windows partition, leave alone.
Grub will give you the option to boot into Windows. Good luck!
Posted by Bald Guy | April 29, 2010 5:32 PM
Posted on April 29, 2010 17:32