Ubuntu Linux released version 8.10, aka "Intrepid Ibex" last week. I have been a faithful Ubuntu user since lat 2004 when I installed it on an older 400 mhz sandbox I had. It did not take too long for me to duel boot that and WinXp on my main PC, a P4, 3 ghz, Nvidia 5600 video card home built unit with Ubuntu being the OS of choice.
I have only done a complete reinstall a couple of times and those were mostly due to upgrade failures...I am not sure which version but one of them failed horribly on most of my upgrades (both home and work). I have been very pleased with the free OS from Canonical. It has been stable and performed very well in the Windows-centric world we live in.
I have faithfully upgraded to each new version with only a couple of failures along the way...not bad for seven to eight upgrades. On Saturday I upgraded my loaner laptop from work, an HP NC-6000 with an ATI Mobile Radeon 9600 graphics card, 1 gig of RAM, and a 1.5 ghz processor. It was formally my work laptop until the handware refresh a few months ago and it served me well for 3+ years.
The install went smoothly, albeit slowly (the download speeds were bouncing up and down a lot) so it took about 3 hours to download, install, and configure the laptop before I considered it finished. Outside of the length of time it took to get the upgrade complete, my only complaint was the video. I kept getting an error telling me that it was going to default to generic video settings. I fought with it for a while before I managed to find this link that explained and helped me out. A few minutes later and I was back in business with the open source drivers and the laptop was "good to go". Well, there was one small issue. Since I was wireless when I did the upgrade, I was knocked offline and forced to enter the WEP info again. I was glad I had it memorized.
On Sunday, I decided to upgrade my dual boot "main" PC to 8.10. After my experiences with th laptop, I was a little nervous, but I knew that there was little I could not fix if I set my mind to it.
As before, the download took a long time but the installing and configuring went much faster since the P4 was faster than the mobile centrino processor in the laptop. Once the configuring was done, I rebooted and BINGO, the machine was back up and running.
So, what do I think? Not much difference so far. No problems or crashes to report. I will have more to report later.
BTW, 8.04 will not prompt you to upgrade to 8.10 unless you tell it to (System | Administration | Software Sources | Updates | Normal Releases).
No comments:
Post a Comment