Before you read anything, bare this in mind.. What you read could be wrong, although I do try and check things out first!
Day One in the Ubuntu 9.10 install house:
Here’s a brief diary of my progress with Ubuntu 9.10.
To start with I’m installing it on a HP NX6125 laptop (dual boot), but will hopefully get it loaded onto the PC as well.
Well, down loaded Ubuntu 9.10 distro created myself a boot CD and fired up the install. Booted the CD up, normal menu appear to give me the option of live cd etc, nothing different there. So, selected the install option and appeared a sleek minimalist Ubuntu icon.
So far so good.. CD was spinning away for a fair while, enough for a bead of sweat to appear and me think “oh.. err, have I just wiped my laptop”. But I let it continue and with a sigh of relief the installer appeared.
Seems to be almost the same as the 9.04 process, so no panic’s there. The only thing I could see that appeared to be slightly different was that the installer suggested a keyboard layout, can’t remember if it was in 9.04 installer. But that worked very well. Does the same in 9.04 installer
Carried on with the install, and it gave me all the normal things about setting up the hard drive etc, so I fired up “install”. This did seem to take a bit longer than that of 9.04, but by the look of it, it was connecting to the Internet, so it could be my connection was having a slow moment and the fact it was late my perception of time could be off!
Install finished, rebooted, and popped up with a new version of Grub, which worked without issue. The boot process seemed a little quicker, but again, this wasn’t actually timed (I was more interested in getting it installed!). Got presented with a new login manager screen / theme which looked very official (and brown), logged in, and away I went.
Managed to fire up the wireless drivers with the restricted driver option without issue (in 9.04 I had to do an update before hand), connected to the wi-fi and away I went on the waves of the web.
So, that’s day one done.. Now for day two!!
Day Two in the Ubuntu 9.10 install house:
Well, I’ve been installing a few things, and getting used to the new Add/Remove program (now called Ubuntu Software Centre).. Got to say I missed the terminal box appearing, but I’m sure I’ll get over it.
I’ve hit my first “oh, that’s not there” moment today. In my quest to have the most mixed bag of desktop set-up pictures and themes, I always like to give myself a new GDM theme.. But, oh no, with the new version you can’t do that now 
But, I guess I’m not using GDM all day, so another thing to get over.
As I think I have already mentioned, it does seem to start up a bit quicker. From reading round to see if I could get themes back into action, it appears that they want to get X up and running as quick as possible.
Day Three in the Ubuntu 9.10 install house:
Well, I was having a problem with the hibernate feature in 9.10 and as a sanity check decided to put 9.04 back on my laptop (isn’t it great when the OS doesn’t require you to prove your life history just to install it, oh and when it’s free is good as well!) and as I suspected it worked perfectly, so not sure what is going on there.. At the present I’m running on 9.04 at the moment.
Day Something in the Ubuntu 9.10 install house:
Well, I think I must be a sucker for punishment as I’ve tried 9.10 again, but this time I’ve give it a try on the main PC. The install worked without issue and the wi-fi drivers + display drivers (nVidia) were found in the restricted drivers section.
The only issue I had was with the display not working correctly as I have a dual screen set-up and for some reason it didn’t want to let the other one work correctly and wasn’t saving the details. After a bit of Grrrrrrr’ing I decided to consult the google and with luck the first page that appeared did the trick for me. It appears that with nVidia settings panel, you have to run it from a command screen and issue it with sudo.
The links are:
‘Failed to parse existing file etc/X11/xorg.conf !
or
nvidia settings can’t save to conf file
Day 30th Nov 2009 in the Ubuntu 9.10 install house:
Well the installation on the main PC seems to be still working well. The only exception is that the login screen from GDM seems to change it’s mind which screen it’s going to appear on (at the present it’s not the primary screen), so something to look into!
So, with things working well on the PC, I wanted to try out some virtual machining (it had been talked about at a couple of meetings). So it was suggested in the IRC channel that I try Virtual Box, which I did and have to say I’m very impressed with it. You will need to tweak your apt sources so you can install it by the software manager, but all the instructions are on the site.
I managed to get two different flavours of M$ Win running very easily. The only issue I came across was the virtual hard drive I created wasn’t big enough so with the help of some more OOS software called Clone Zilla (it’s a bit like Ghost for disk / partition backing-up / cloning).
To increase the size, all it took was to create a new virtual disk, attach it to the virtual machine as a primary slave, then mount the Clone Zilla iso image in Virtual Box. From here I was able to clone the first virtual disk onto the new bigger virtual disk (there were a few more steps involved, but it’s pretty much what I’ve put here)..
If you are going to try Clone Zilla, please be careful as you can wipe entire drives with a few key strokes (it does warn you few time though)
Don’t you just love OOS software! 
All I need now is Ubuntu 9.10 to work fully on my laptop..
By
The author (Dave R)
