A couple weeks ago I bit the bullet and upgraded my desktop (before it was official) to the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu Linux.

Typically stuff like that scares me because it can, and in the past has, rendered my system useless when attempting to upgrade other distributions. That's the joy of jumping on the 'testing' bandwagon I guess.

The good news is, that this time around, my desktop upgrade went smooth. Infact, it was so smooth I didn't even have to 'tweak' a thing. I was pretty impressed so the following weekend I upgraded my laptop, and it too went smooth. A clean upgrade without having to reformat your computer is always A Good Thing™.

Pretty impressive. So my upgrade rampage continued. I did a fresh install using their new 'server' CD on my home server - which is essentially a bare install without the desktop stuff. (yeah, so we all know I'm a geek) I had to do a fresh install because my server wasn't using Ubuntu and it had way too much unused junk installed anyways so clean is best. I thought this time around I'd do something that I normally (as well as many other people) have trouble with. That is setup the main system disk drives using software raid. (it's kind of a catch 22 - software raid requires the OS to be loaded before it can initiate the disks and use them, so how does one boot off of a system disk that consists of software raid?) The answer is easy, use the Debian/Ubuntu installer. I told it what disks to use, I told it to make them a mirror (two disks with identical data) using software RAID and it did.

It installed. It booted. It worked. I didn't have to screw around with it one bit.

Can you tell I'm impressed?

This new version also has direct support for Thin Clients (diskless computers, network terminals) so I'll have to give that a go eventually and see how nice it works. This is something I've messed around with in the past and have had success doing it in the non-easy way. If this is the easy way I have high hopes, that's for sure.

Aside from the incredibly easy and clean upgrades there's a whole bundle of 'new' features too of course. Since Ubuntu is heavily Gnome based, these features are mostly all related to Gnome itself and the new 2.12 version. It's packed with eye candy and features that I kinda shrugged off when I read. But now that I use them, they're smart. I like them a lot. They added eye candy - these will only get better, user features, a menu editor for users to change their own menus around, an easier to use program installer for non-techies... I could go on and on, but you could just read the release here: Ubuntu - Ubuntu 5.10 Released

Needless to say, my favorite Linux distribution just got better.