A couple of quick notes, have just upgraded my media PC to the latest ubuntu, it did it via the on-line distro upgrade, nice and neatly with no impact on current programs and user accounts (a little slow perhaps but i bet that the servers are having the hell beaten out of them at the moment). first impressions are very very good
Its a even cleaner interface and while it has more than a hint of “apple” about it (boooooo), there are lots of new features, ones like the palimpset Disk Utility,
that does pre-warning on drive failures (a feature that up until now I had only experienced on enterprise raid arrays), this give you confidence in this version as a stable platform, very very impressed
On that note, those of you who use Ubuntu on a serious work machine such as I do, and are still on 8.04, might wonder why you don’t get the “upgrade to” notice on the top of the “Update manager” screen when a new major version comes out, the reason is that you will have your software support updates set to “Long term support Releases Only” (which is what 8.04 is), if you want to get the update option (you will have to go through all the previous versions first, ie 8.10 –> 9.04 –> 9.10), just go.
System –> Administration –> Software Services
and change this to “Normal Releases”
Close that, then reopen your update manager, and you will find (after ensuring that you have no more updates to install) that you are presented with the chance to update to a newer distribution, and given what i see on 9.10 i wish they would hurry up and define the next long term support release, so i can do that on my work laptop 🙂