Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

Running 10.04 in VirtualBox OSE was not showing me the speed benefits of the newest distribution. So I went ahead and upgraded last night ahead of the schedule. I hit Alt+F2 and typed in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager opened up with message: New distribution release '10.04' is available. I clicked on 'upgrade' and followed the instructions from there. The "-d" is critical since the final release is not out yet. "-d" (deprecated) is the switch that will list the distribution upgrade as available prior to its 4/29 final release. Running the new distribution on a Samsung NC10 netbook start up (<30 seconds) and shutdown (~5 seconds) are noticeably faster. Not as fast as if I had a SDD (supposedly <5 seconds) but still faster than the 9.10 distribution in both categories. This is, I've read, due to the fact that they have removed the HAL in this distribution. Although I'm not yet completely clear on what that means. If you know please leave a comment below explaining. During the upgrade there were a few common sense questions to answer such as do you want to keep the locally installed grub config or go with the package managers. Since I also have XP on this machine (haven't touched it in months) I stayed with the local one. During the process Canonical also gives a message that they no longer provide updates for a fairly long list of items, most of which I suspect are related to the fact that they dropped the HAL. Not a problem I would think as long as you have the right software respositories turned on. So I'm off to compute away on 10.04. As I notice important differences, I'll report back.