I just rebooted my work desktop into Karmic Koala, the new release of Ubuntu, my preferred distribution of GNU/Linux. I don’t have much substantive to say, but the qualitative experience has so far been pretty amazing.
Not only did I get to work all day while the upgrade was downloading, only having to reboot at the very end, but everything worked as I expected when I rebooted – which is to say that the only thing which didn’t work was VMWare, which I expected to not work as with every kernel upgrade. I might even take this as an opportunity to give Virtualbox a proper try (it was less than amazing last time I did).
Let me make that really clear – I only had about twenty minutes of downtime for the entire upgrade, and it would have been less if the installer had left upgrading Firefox until the end, as that was the only thing which broke (and even then, only partly – no new urls, but clicking through links was fine) while the upgrade was going on. Try that with Windows 🙂
Things feel just a little snappier, just a little shinier. I’m really impressed so far. The new theme and icon set is lovely.
If you’ve been putting off trying out Ubuntu or Linux in general, now’s a great time to start!
hypatia dot ca 
I recently dug out an old IBM Thinkpad R50, previously mothballed for about 5 years due to a failed hdd. Since my backup lappy had just died, time to rehab the R50 with something new.
Following upgrades to hdd (dead 30gb out, new 160gb in), RAM (old 512 out, new 2GB in), and added proper internal 802.11g card, decided to make it a dual-boot machine. Corporate version of XP still has its uses, and was a freebie anyway.
Install of XP, from CD-in to final patch: Approx 4 hrs. Tack on another 2 hrs for assorted browsers, firewalls, extra gizmos and such, to total near 6.
Install of Koala, from CD-in through all updates to the last gadget/gizmo/toy/utility I could want from the software center? 1 hour 48 min.
This is the first release of Ubuntu that I’m comfortable with as a daily driver. Found every piece of hardware on the R50 without having to crack open NDISwrapper. Help files are bonehead-simple yet instructive.
Big fat kudos to the dev team.
Sadly, my experience was not the same — upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 dumped my video driver, and the failure mode for 9.10’s X windows during bootup is to keep trying to restart it every 1/3 of a second or more, which left me spamming Ctrl-Alt-F1 for a few minutes (handcramp!) in the hopes of getting a text terminal so I could fix things. This would’ve terrified anyone used to Apple or M$ Windows.
I also had the newer apparmor feature “protect” my system from running the DHCP client at /sbin/dhclient — I needed Google to help me figure that one out, but no net connection means I needed a second computer to fix it.
Still, at least I *could* fix these on my own, instead of being locked out and S. Outta L. until Service Pack 1 or the next catgirl-themed release.
I am not a huge fan of Ubuntu… no particular hatred for it, but my allegiances have always been with Red Hat/Fedora 🙂 I might have to try it out on a VM. Which leads me to the whole purpose for leaving this comment–I don’t know when the last time you used VirtualBox was, and I don’t know what you are using it for specifically, but I LOVE VBox. I’ve never had a problem with it and the most recent release has worked flawlessly for me with several (like 5 or 6) distros of Linux. It is especially fantastic while using Guest Additions and seamless mode for Windows. I haven’t tried Windows 7 yet, however.
Woo!
Totally agreed with Whitney… I don’t know when you last used VirtualBox, but these days it’s totally dynamite! I just installed it for the first time and I’m completely blown away. It’s fast, efficient, powerful and has tons of great features. I can’t even be bothered to steal VMware anymore 🙂
haha, you know VMware is free now eh :p
My upgrade went smoothly except that Oracle stopped working. Oracle was throwing the error ORA-27125: unable to create shared memory segment during boot. After a bit of Googling it appears that it may have something to do with the kernel options. The solution provided here
http://www.randombugs.com/linux/ora-27125-unable-to-create-shared-memory-segment.html
woks like a charm.
Hey Leigh, this is SigFLUP from BlockParty/NOTaCON. I don’t know if you remember me. Raging apologies about this not being related to your post BUT… are you coming to @party?