Officially, Ubuntu 8.10 drops in a few days, but from my experience, a few days outside of its release is usually close enough to be considered final, as they have to package up the actual release and everything is pretty much stable and done. So from my newly-installed Ubuntu 8.04 install from a minimal install CD to help get rid of all the bloat Ubuntu typically throws in there, I did a simple update using sudo do-release-upgrade –devel-release, which nicely automated the process. Soon enough, I had a new 8.10 system waiting a reboot away.
Unfortunately an interesting thing happened — 8.10 did not (from what I saw) have normally packaged nvidia kernel drivers as usual, and it took a moment to realize that I had to use envyng-core to install, made worse by the fact that it wouldn’t install the 9xxx drivers (the most optimal for my older nvidia card). The 173 series drivers worked well enough, though, and everything seems to be running fine now. Still need to do a manual compile of my kernel because the libata drivers still do not work well with my drive controller, slowing the entire system down more than it should on heavy disk access and occasionally causing problems with CD reads and writes.
I definitely encourage everyone to update when it hits, though. Ubuntu just gets better with every release and even though I have had issues with it over the years, it’s still the single best Linux distro out there right now for desktop use in my view. I still like Arch, Slackware, Debian, and others, but for a system that I need the best performance and reliability out of (my desktop), I have found that relying on Ubuntu is my best bet.
