The latest Ubuntu was released over the weekend; version 10.10 (for the 10th month of 2010), named Maverick Meerkat. I downloaded both the 64-bit and 32-bit desktop editions, and put the 64-bit on a USB drive (so much faster than optical disk). I plugged it into the laptop, rebooted and chose the USB drive as the boot drive. In seconds the new desktop was running. A couple of mouse clicks and the restricted WiFi driver was installed, and the system was running and web-surfing. I decided that was enough to give the upgrade a go.

The upgrade went without any real hitches. I've long been partitioning my drive so that there's about 16GB for the OS (usually less than 1/2 of that gets used), 8GB (double my RAM) for swap, and the remainder for /home. I then install most of my installation-free (that is, unpack and use) software in my home folder, so there's very little to reinstall after upgrading.

One really nice thing about the new installer is that it started copying files as soon as the drive was partitioned (or in my case, the partitions were assigned to mount points, formatting only the root). The normal set-up questions were asked while the files copied. Granted, it already had my timezone selected, and I just had to create my initial user, so it only saved a very short time, but that struck me as rather inventive. Of course, there's no need for the installation to care about those things until everything's copied; don't know why I didn't even think of it sooner...

Rebooting after the installation, and pleasantly the restricted WiFi driver I selected to use from the LiveUSB (I'm coining that one) was still enabled. I chose to install the restricted NVidia driver to get better use of my graphics card, too. I did notice that none of my panel shortcuts persisted, and my desktop wasn't showing my previously selected background, nor was my user photo in place. I thought at first these were perhaps just lost or changed as part of the upgrade, but that turned out to not be the case.

In a weird blunder, I created my user with a different name. This gave me a momentary WTF as I seemed to loose everything in my home folder. I noticed the /home folder had two users, giving me relief; all of my files were still there, as expected. After a quick edit of a few /etc files, and rebooting after adding the restricted video driver, and I was the right user again. My shortcuts were there, and my rotating background was right, too.

As expected, most of my apps and settings were there. A few apps that I use that aren't installed by default (Terminator, Synergy, Pidgin), but quickly added using the software center. For a couple more (Chrome, VirtualBox) I needed to download and run the .deb files and they were restored, too. In all cases, the previous settings were still valid, including my VirtualBox VMs (I didn't start a VM, just VirtualBox, but I've not had a problem with that in the past, and if I did, I'd put that on VirtualBox, not Ubuntu).

First impressions? The UI seems about the same, but "feels" more responsive. According to the System Monitor app, the CPUs are hovering at a constant 15-20% each with only Pidgin and Chrome running, and the system monitor...same even after closing all other Chrome tabs and stopping Pidgin; monitor blames X and monitor...heh; looking at processes instead of the graph drops the use to about 10% total (can't see by CPU in that view), so must be the graph updater is too busy.

Still uses OpenOffice 3.2, so that's the same, and the same Firefox as the latest 10.04 update had. Looks like they replaced F-Stop with Shotwell as the default photo manager, and GIMP still hasn't returned ('though it was highlighted in the installation slideshow). RhythmBox is still the music player, and it found all my music; one thing to note, the installer asked if I wanted to add a licensed MP3 library at the start, so I didn't have to find those restricted libraries.

I fired up Eclipse and IntelliJ using the shortcuts that were already on the menu panel, and they both fired up as expected, finding my workspaces; I didn't bother running anything, I just wanted to see if it found the stuff. Starting Pidgin still had my contacts. Starting Firefox had my plug-ins and theme, and even my most visited sites.

Starting Chrome, though, lost my shortcuts. I just pinned a few favorites on the New Tab page that you get when you bonk the plus symbol to open a new tab. They were gone. The theme, too, was reset to the default. Opening my most common sites, like this blog, and all of my saved passwords were gone as well. This makes me wonder if there's not some weird UUID folder used after it installs or if the files aren't stored in my home directory. Either makes me go "hmm" to myself a little bit.

Both Chrome and Firefox had Flash enabled without adding anything. This could have been because of previous installation of the plug-in, or something with the installer; I've not checked which is the case.

In all, I'm impressed with how clean the upgrade went, and am very pleased that there weren't any unexpected nuisances. Just my blunder of not remembering my own username.