Doesn't time fly? It's been six months already and the next Ubuntu is due in the a week or so.

Earlier this month I had decided to stick to Ubuntu 9.10. For the first time in my Ubuntu experience, I had found a version that didn't need upgrading. Karmic Koala required no messing around over the last six months, no compiling of apps that were the wrong version or not even in the repo. Life has been easy.

Then, on Friday, I was checking out my local cut-price computer parts store, as I periodically do, when I noticed they had Kingston SSD drives for a pretty decent price. I read a couple of reviews and it turned out that Kingston's drive was pretty good, not up to the standard's of Intel's X series of course, but good value for money.

Finally, it was time to take a chance on an SSD as a boot drive. And with a new boot drive drive, I had to reinstall Ubuntu. As the 10.04 release is almost upon us, it seemed like fate had decided I was going to upgrade to Lucid Lynx.

Here is my take on beta 2, nine days before the final release.

First Impressions

The first thing I did was to crack open my PC's case, remove the old drive and installed the new SSD and 1.5TB Seagate drive that was to become my new home folder. The SSD is tiny, and unsurprisingly, it didn't really fit any of the drive bays in my typical tower case. On the plus side, since it's also light and has no moving parts, I just cheated and screwed one side of it into a 3.5" drive bay that had screw holes at a convenient height so that the drive was resting on the floor of the bay and wasn't just hanging off the screws. So long as we don't have any more massive earth quakes like we did the other day, I have no concerns.

Next, I booted off the Lynx live cd. After a few minutes (CDs are slow), I was presented with the new Ubuntu desktop theme. Before I get onto that, I'd like to mention that the boot process was a little disconcerting because the screen went black a few seconds after the desktop wallpaper appeared and stayed that way for a further 30 to 60 seconds. As the CD drive was still making noises, I left it alone, and sure enough, the full desktop finally appeared. All I can say is, be patient.

What can I say about the new theme? Mmmm, purple.

Ubuntu has traditionally had a brown and orange desktop in keeping with the theme of "humanity", which has often caused certain people to complain, myself not included, though I do admit that I had no particular fondness for the colour selections. The new theme of purple and dark gray looks far more professional, and surprisingly, works quite well. In a world of operating system blues, greens and greys, purple stands out. I can't think of another operating system off the top of my head that uses this colour scheme, so it makes Ubuntu look unique, in a good way. Nicely done.

Installation

Immediately after checking out the menus for changes (where's my Gimp, dammit!), I launched the installer. Ubuntu has certainly come a long way, as again, it's quite professional looking with the fancy adverts that are now displayed while installation progresses.

It was during the installation that I encountered my first issue with Lynx. I got to the drive partitioning page and set my system up so that the 64GB drive would be the boot drive, the 1.5TB was home and I had the partitioner leave the WinXP drive alone. Moving forward though the installation process, when I was presented with the summary, it informed me that there were no drives to format, which was odd. I thought, "what the hell", clicked go and and let it perform the install. Sure enough, the correct drives were formatted, but unfortunately, but the actual install errored out at about 60% claiming the disc was damaged.

As I'd already MD5'd the disc before installation, I knew it was fine, so I buffed the disc a little on my t-shirt to remove any wayward fingerprints that might be gumming up the install, rebooted and started the process anew. This time, the installer correctly identified that it had to format the new drives and did so, finishing successfully this time.

Rebooting left the computer hanging just after the BIOS check, as though the SSD was not bootable. The XP drive was also no longer bootable, coming up with a grub error, which meant that Ubuntu had wiped the Windows boot sector.

Time for some payback, eh Mr. Shuttleworth? For all those grubs obliterated by the Windows installer?

With an intuitive leap, I rearranged which SATA sockets the drives were plugged into so that the SSD was recognised as the first master, the home drive was the first slave and the WinXP drive was the second master. Fast forward through reinstalling again and the PC was now bootable, followed by a visit to the recovery console to get WinXP back up.

Real world use

Because of the SSD, the computer starts up in about 15 seconds after POSTing, give or take. Small apps, like GEdit, now open in under a second, while big apps, like Open Office, take almost two seconds to open the first time. Subsequently opening any app that's been started once is nearly instantaneous, except for Gimp, which stubbornly always takes about two seconds to open. Appalling!

Hardware wise, my wireless USB dongle connects quicker and seems to maintain higher speeds. I did have trouble with the nVidia drivers though. The system detected that the card was in the machine, and then installed the drivers, but produced an error something like "Jockey couldn't complete the install". Rebooting the system showed that the nVidia driver is actually installed, but the system thinks it isn't. Weird. Doesn't matter, it's working, and I'm sure this problem will be resolved before the final release as I'm not the only one who's had it. The only side effect of this is that the boot and shutdown splash screens are now low-res, but as they only briefly flicker into life before disappearing, thanks to the SSD, I'm not that bothered.

I rather like the new Empathy applet. I'd never bothered even investigating Empathy in the previous Ubuntu release, but this time, it was so easy to get into, it practically logged me into my chat accounts by itself, putting Pidgin out of work in the process, with none of the messing around I'd had to do to get Pidgin to connect to gtalk, for instance. That's ease of use and that's what people love.

And finally, the same old problem as last time, and the time before that has reared it's head. Flash. Sure, it installed OK, but it installed the 32bit version and the wrapper. Seriously, guys? The 32bit version simply doesn't work properly on any 64bit system I've tried it on, so I always end up having to manually install the 64bit version. It's been out for ages, so why not use it?

What about Trim?

The first round of SSDs that came out a few years ago suffered from a rather annoying flaw. When updating or deleting files, the drives typically marked the block of memory cells the file was in as unavailable. Over time, depending on how much was stored on the drive, the entire drive would fill with these unavailable sectors rendering it unusable.

At the moment, Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't support Trim as support is coming in the next kernel, which will be out after the final release of Lucid Lynx. I doubt I'm going to need to worry about this problem for a month or two as my complete Ubuntu install only using a tiny fraction of the 64GB available on this drive, so I'll simply wait for a solution to emerge, presumably a custom version of the kernel. Even if the worst happens and there is no solution, I can simply format the SSD when it fills up and be back up and running in under half an hour.

In summary

I really had no pressing need to upgrade from Karmic Koala, but the new theme and the little improvements I've been seeing all over the place have made it well worth the effort of moving up to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx.