So 1000 and something packages and about 900mb later I have a completely uptodate version of Ubuntu my upgrade to the new 6.10 version of Ubuntu finished late Saturday night and I sat tweaking things until early Sunday morning.

I had hoped things would go smoothly, but they didn’t. I had to fix plenty of odd dependency problems by hand but eventually it installed everything and I had a working installation of Ubuntu again.

First impression is it’s alot faster, not only on bootup but in general usage too of course I don’t have any scientific proof that it’s faster but it does feel faster in normal use.

I still have a few odd problems that I need to fix like my grub menu/theme seems to have disappeared and I would like to know how can I get bootup messages and keep the fancy graphical startup (haven’t look hard at this solution yet though.) because I want to know what’s failing and what’s not while I boot.

I did try AIGLX & Beryl but that didn’t go so well I ended up with X starting but not starting and the console stuck on tty7, I couldn’t ALT+F1 to get to a login prompt and in the end had to test/debug everything through SSH. The strange thing is that X never gave me any errors. I won’t give up yet on it and will try to sort it when I got a few free hours to kill.

Otherwise Ubuntu 6.10 feels like a more “polished” version of Ubuntu as they move closer to “a linux for humans” or a “it just works” type of distribution. I am impressed and am sure that it would be better if it was a clean install of Ubuntu rather than the apt-get dist-upgrade that I did, but I’m happy with and it works nicely now.