9.10 Karmic vs. Lynx 10.04

I've got my A110 setup pretty much to my liking based on 9.10, except for the boot time that's a bit long. Reading through the forums I only notice the problems ofcourse so here's my question; What are the real advantages of upgrading to 10.04? I probably won't since I'm happy now but I still want to know

 

For the average user, the very real, very relevant advantage to running Ubuntu 10.04 vs. 9.10 is Long Term Support.

 

For various reasons, I have recently gone from 9.04 to 9.10 (upgrade path), to 10.04 LTS (clean install). I had been running 9.04 for about a year, and (after a fair amount of tweaking, including a kernel upgrade), it was quite stable. However, the non-standard kernel caused problems with Remastersys. Because I upgraded, rather than did a clean install of 9.10, I was using grub, rather than grub2, which again, caused problems with Remastersys. I bit the bullet, and did a clean install of 10.04 which, after fixing the grub2 error 15 problem (see: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275&highlight=grub2+error+15 ) has been quite stable. With a SSD, the D150 boots in under 20 seconds, and shuts down in under 5 seconds. I did not like the default appearance choices in 10.04, and reverted to my own customized version of Clearlooks, with Human icons. Unless I am forgetting something, I did not have to apply any compatibility tweaks; all features of the AA1 D150 worked with 10.04 out of the box (including wifi, wifi indicator LED, and proper suspend when closing the lid, all of which required tweaks with 9.04). 10.04 adds a very nice disk utility, which is present, but not fully functional, in 9.10.

So, after some misgivings, due to the switch to grub2, I'm very pleased with 10.04, and have no plans to revert to an earlier version.

 

Thanks guys! Yeah that Long Term Support sure is a good advantage. I've got some scripts added in /bin and usr/bin and a lot of altered application settings in my home folder that I don't want to do again after an upgrade. Maybe I'll make a decent backup and still go for a jump in the 10.04 release.

 

Boot time is one of the big advantages--someone was posting 3-5 seconds on some odd machine, and over 30 seconds (grub to desktop w/ autologin enabled) is slow.
"Standard" advice (in the testing forum) is to either have a separate /home partition or use rsync to backup. I don't do either, but the latter may be interesting to you.

I found that it boots very quick, though my choice of display manager (lxdm/slim/nodm)/WM (IceWM)/file manager (pcmanfm/rox-filer) definitely helps; nodm is the fastest, but is "autologin with only one session type possible".
Grub2 is rotten both for tweaking and for boot time; the good news is that grub-legacy is still fully supported (main, till 2015);

Code:

sudo apt-get install grub
#Use grub-install /dev/sd(a,b,c,..) to install

Grub2 has oddball stuff that other machines can use, though-915resolution, efi emulation, lua module, etc...

That allows booting with the enter key pressed, 2-10 seconds faster (grub2 will lock up if you try).
Note that the enter key only works if you have a boot menu...

 

10.04 runs perfectly on the AO532h.