Okay I immediately downloaded and backed my Ubuntu partition up on Dustpuppy (my loving laptop). Takes a while to make the backup, but i was exited through the whole process to get a clean, new, fresh and hopefully faster Ubuntu install.
Gparted
First off I resized my NTFS partition to be a bit bigger. Been using my windows partition heavily for Photoshop and development (side effect of being away from home alot due to heavy university load). The whole process of deleting the old Ubuntu partitions, resizing the NTFS leaving me with about 70 GB free unpartitioned space went like a breeze with Gparted from the live cd.
Install
The installation went easy as ever. No problems, easy to install and extremely fast. My backup took way longer than the install did. After install i was greeted by the Grub bootloader and without a hitch could choose both Windows XP and my Ubuntu 8.04 install. A short bootload later and the brown welcome screen greets me.
First impressions
I love it! Its running smoothly, 3d was easy to install… basically everything just works! I immediately fired up Synaptic and started typing in my commonly used applications. Here i hit my first snag.. overload on the repositories. A download speed of about 20kb/sec wasn’t that fine when i had a ton of stuff to download. But a pleasant surprise was in store as i under the “repositories” dialog for Synaptic could select “other” for the server i wanted to use. I expected to be greeted with a dialog asking for a specific server URL, but was extremely pleasantly surprised when i see a precompiled list of servers. Further more a button allows me to quickly test all servers to find the fastest one. I select that fastest and a minute later im flying the downloads at 1 Mb/sec !
No Automatix
I was sad to find that Automatix (homepage) was no longer in development. apparently some of the key developers were busy with normal life and at the same time got hired by the company behind a new distro. So no more automatix for now.
However this was easily fixed as most of the packages i used from Automatix were available through Medibuntu.
Conclusion
I like it 😉 Fast, more stable and so far a lot of small improvements that i really like. Especially love the whole world clock applet, with weather forecast included.
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