Ubuntu 9.10 Official Release

Update manager just told me that 9.10 is now available.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/release ... 10overview

I'm very conservative (and don't have a bootable backup to my 9.04 installation) so I have no intention of upgrading today. Probably sometime next week, if there are no horror stories.

Since 9.04 was my introduction to Ubuntu, I have no experience with the upgrade process. It looks pretty straightforward, and everything else about Ubuntu has been very polished, so my anxiety level is fairly low. On the other hand, everything works (I just noticed that the green WiFi traffic indicator light started working again; not sure when that happened.)

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Any 9.10 experiences to report from early adapters? I'm interested in production desktop 9.10 experiences, not those of beta testers or UNR users.

 

I upgraded this morning it took about 3 hours on my aspire one so I recomend if you can to do a fresh install to save time. But it went ok except for the normal pitfalls of having to edit the grulb menu, ubuntu install recognizes the restore partition but not windows xp partion so i had to edit it after it was done and add it to the menu.lst.

 

Thank you -- these are very useful tips, especially the part about the grub menu. I'll wait for more reports, and continue reading release notes and upgrade instructions. I assume you did not convert from ext3 to ext4. Looking at some performance comparisons, there seems little real world performance improvement with ext4, although if I were to do a fresh install, I suppose I use the newer filesystem.

I think I'll follow the same strategy I used with my original Ubuntu installation, install first to a flash drive, with various options (upgrade from 9.04; wipe and install with ext3; wipe and install with ext4) before doing a real install on the HDD. This will give me a chance to make some benchmarks.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and for now I have tweaked 9.04 to be exactly the way I like it.

 

I updated my Netbook Remix Ubuntu today. i think it includes all of the normal changes from 9.04. please not i am using the AA1 ZG5 (8.9) with 512MB RAM.

-there is a clutter-menu update, there a few problems with it, for example i can reorder any of the icons yet, only add and delete from sections.
-the WiFi light blinks now!
-it boots slower for me ... wayyyyyy slower than it did under 9.04

other than that ... no major problems i wasn't able to solve without messing with it for a while

 

I did my first upgrade last night, on a vanilla install of 9.04 to a Transcend 8 gb SD card. Acer 150 was plugged in to power supply, and using a wireless internet connection (Apple Airport Express). I fell asleep before it finished the installation phase, so benchmark times are approximate.

9.04 boot: 2 minutes

Upgrade:
- Prepping the upgrade/Setting new software channels: 10 minutes
- Getting new packages 1:37
- Installing the upgrade: 4 hours
- Cleaning up: 5:30

1st reboot: 2 minutes
2nd reboot: 60 seconds

Free space on 8 gb SD memory card: 3.5 gb

No surprises. If SD boot time is representative, then boot times have been cut in half with 9.10, which is impressive. Video performance seems a little smoother, but I had already made some tweaks to 9.04 that improved video. I haven't yet tried to play a HD video, which has always been problematic with 9.04.

I've decided that I don't want to do a fresh install on the HDD, as I would hate to lose all the customizations, additional software, etc., that have accumulated over the past 6 months of use. I will continue monitoring for 9.10 problem reports before tackling the HDD upgrade. Back up everything I can, and document as many tweaks as possible. I suspect that the Canonical distribution site was getting hit pretty hard last night, so I'm hoping that by waiting, using a wired ethernet connection, and faster HDD speed, my "production" upgrade next week will go faster.

So far, so good.

 

like a guy suggested, clean install if you can.
I dl'd the new 64bit version in 40 something minutes and was on an USB before I knew it too and the install was quite quick compared to upgrading on my other pc which took all of 4-5hrs.
But then again, with lots of people installing yesterday it doesn't surprise me but still it is better to clean install if you can

hehe, wrote this without saying how good it is (hence the edit)
so much better, Jaunty had problems for me and I actually reverted back to Intrepid (which was my favourite distro until now).
This distro is by far the best, haven't had enough time to fully play with it yet but on first inspections it is much nicer (shame the NBR version is being silly and won't install on my AAO)

 

A clean install is definitely the way to go if you don't have a significant investment in your existing installation, but I figure I would spend at least as much time re-creating my current environment (UI customizations, software, settings, passwords, etc., etc., etc.). If I'm unhappy with the upgrade route, I can always start over with a clean install.

Am I correct to assume that, although Grub isn't aware of a Windows partition in an upgrade, it will be with a clean install? Much as I loathe Windows, it has its uses.

 

just a fyi

I tried to update my desktop pc ubuntu and it showed it would take a day so I decide to do a fresh install and 9.10 seemed to install grub2 versus grub so you will have to use a new way to add commands for the kernal, its not bad but you cant just add it to the menu.lst and it was replaced by grub.cfg which is not editable. you have to edit a script and then run update-grub when I upgraded my acer it kept grub1 so its the same. Maybe I missed the option on the desktop install to use grub 1. The only thing I add to the kernal line is pciehp.pciehp_force=1 for the card readers. So in other words if you do a fresh install look for an option to keep grub intead of grub2 might be easier, on ubuntu forums there are post on info to edit grub2 booting. on the desktop I have windows 7 rc so it found that ok and then I get another menu from there to select win xp, so it did find win 7 anyway

if you do get grub2 then heres the proceedure to add a commandline command to the kernal

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

on line #9:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vmalloc=512m"

then save & run "sudo update-grub"

 

Before attempting a production upgrade of the 32 gb ext3 partition on my 160 gb HDD, I plan to create a recovery image by booting from an SD memory card, with Ubuntu 9.10, using partimage to create the partition recovery image on an 8 gb flash drive. I only have about 9 gb (uncompressed) on the HDD, so, with compression, this fits easily on the 8 gb flash drive.

I am assuming (but want knowledgeable confirmation) that having done this, if something goes wrong, or I don't like 9.10, I can again boot from the SD card, run partimage, and restore the 32gb partition for 9.04 from the flash drive.

Is there anything wrong with my thinking? Any gotchas?

 

Should work. Haven't had a problem with either partimage or fsarchiver. Partimage requires restoration into a partition at least as large as the partition you backed up, whereas fsarchiver only needs a partition large enough to hold all the files. Last I checked, fsarchiver wasn't in the Ubuntu repository - it's available at http://www.fsarchiver.org.

The only potential problem I forsee is that because 9.10 uses Grub2, reverting to your backup will probably mean reinstalling grub before the system will boot. On the other hand, I haven't found any reason to revert to 9.04; hope your experience is similar.

 

It's my understanding that for an upgrade grub is retained; grub2 is used only for a fresh install. The other gotcha that I am aware of is that partimage is not yet compatible with ext4; since I'm using ext3, no problem there.

Still, based on my experiences with 9.10 running from a SD card, there is no reason for me to upgrade at this time; I'm going to wait for 9.10 to settle down first. Real users, as opposed to beta testers (no matter how diligent) always discover things that were missed in testing.