Just had a look around the Ubuntu forum and it is 'buzzing' - lots of complaints about this or that not working.
Get the impression that all is not well in Linuxland.
As a newbie it occurred to me that it seems a bit over-ambitious and unnecessary to keep bringing out upgrades every six months.
Why do they do it? It barely gives you a chance to get used to the one you've got. 

It's because Gnome updates come out every 6 months, a couple of months before Ubuntu.

Well, I don't know what has happened but this installation seems to be quicker and better than the last one.
Wondered if it could be that Root is on a smaller space? (Does it make any difference?)
Anyway, it is staying this way for while.

I've been considering dual booting between Windows 7 and Ubuntu, might give 9.10 a go on a spare hard drive soon.

If you don't trust the dual boot capabilities, you could always switch between
Windows and Ubuntu by setting the boot drive in your BIOS.

@Chris,

Might also be worth trying the Wubi install method - I'm using this to great success on my NC10.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look when I get some time to do it.

I did a fresh install of 9.10 using wubi and it has been running without problems since the day after it was launched. However, I now cannot get Ubuntu to load. At boot time I get
"kernel panic - not syncing VFS: unable to mount FS on unknown block (8,1)"

The Windows NTFS file system is reported as OK by disk check.

Looking at various forums I am not the only one having this problem.

If you look in a few forums a fragmented NTFS file system can cause problems.
Note that (8,1) means the 2nd partition of your ninth disk (I think)
If you have spare partitions / spare disk I would just put load a vanilla Ubuntu.

If you do, take the custom option and create a separate /home partition.

Is it worth upgrading to 9.10? My netbook is moaning at me about it, and I stupidly installed a new system about 2 weeks before 9.10 came out that I should probably upgrade too...

I do find the first post in this thread incredibly amusing though 

I have upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 recently and all went well for me.
However, apart from (perhaps) a couple of seconds of shorter boot time, you won't see much front-end differences.
Indeed, the interface is a bit monochrome-ish which takes time getting used to.

So an upgrade is optional - but backup your data first.

@cso, Do you use a mobile broadband dongle on your Netbook ?
There are some serious issues ( like a lot don't work! ) on 9.10, I tried the Live CD on my Aspire One and my '3' dongle ( MF627 ) doesn't work.
I think there is a kernel update out to fix the issues but of course the live cd hasn't ( won't ? ) got updated so I can't see if its fixed the problem.
Check for problems with your configuration on www.ubuntuforums.org before you update...

That's not how your first post in this thread reads ;-)


Sometimes, although it's currently sat on a bookshelf at home acting as a webserver for some reason...  I don't have anything important on it, so I might just take the chance and then reinstall if necessary.

Hi Axis/Poppy,etc.,

All this sounds a bit scary. I am contemplating moving from 8.04LTS the only OS on my elderly P111 laptop and have not yet put home on its own partition because of fiddling time limits. It was my intention to install/upgrade to the next LTS which appears to be the sensible approach. However I had a fright recently when someone stated that 9.10 was the next LTS, I thought that 10.04 would be!!!

Are there any words of comfort out there? I do have most of the bumph on how to shift home, some of it a bit scary as well. I really do not want to try much until that has been achieved. I might add that I have a spare HD in a caddy which does not get itself detected by 8.04. This has been  the source of some posts recently. I want to back up most of my important stuff to it before embarking on any updates or partitioning. Advice needed please.

colintivy :-/

It will be!! about April 2010 I believe!!, 9.10 is not an LTS release.