After downloading the just-released Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" live cd via bittorrent at a blistering 800-900Kb/second (seriously, it took 20 minutes to download, and 10 to burn to cd. wow.), I re-partitioned my hard disks and took it for a spin via a clean install.

If I recall correctly, I haven't done a clean install of an operating system since I switched from Debian to Ubuntu many years ago (and I'm not even sure about that - I may well have pulled off some weird hack to upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu without a clean install, but I doubt it). This is a tribute to the stability of Ubuntu, the underlying Debian OS, and the GNU/Linux bedrock at their foundation.

Nonetheless, there's been a LOT of cruft and hackery that have accrued to my filesystem over the years, and I felt the need to make a fresh start and explicitly import the parts of my data and settings I know I wanted to, rather than implicitly submit to whatever deeply ancient and subtle things which may lurk in my filesystem after years of being forgotten.

So, with an eye toward the future, and buoyed by my success with installing the Karmic beta release alongside the existing desktop backup image on my laptop, I decided against just upgrading my existing Jaunty Jackalope release on my desktop PC (an operation that has always gone quite smoothly), and decided instead to exercise the live cd installer's option to install Karmic alongside Jaunty, and dual-boot into another partition. The results have been excellent, and smooth. I'm quite happy with it.

Now, those who know me know I've been a GNU/Linux user for about ten years now. When Ubuntu came out after 2004, it prided itself on targeting average, non-technical desktop users. Since my introduction to GNU/Linux preceded the development of Ubuntu's suite of graphical tools, I knew how to do everything on the command line, instead. This turned out to be a liability with Ubuntu - not because of conflicts with the tools, but because friends of mine using Ubuntu on their own would often find and use the graphical tools to do things I only knew how to do with the obscure command line hacks. With this install, I was pleased to finally learn how to use those, and do things "the Ubuntu way". And it did everything pretty much as I wanted it too. I've put a lot of work into developing and maintaining my own solutions for things, but I am keen to relinquish that and use systems other developers maintain, if they work just as well or better.

First, I used Gparted, rather than fdisk, to edit my partitions, resizing the Jaunty partition down, and adding two smaller 16GB partitions, one for the karmic installation, and one reserved for future use. I plan to mount the Jaunty partition and use it's home directory for both installations, so I can boot back and forth if necessary with the same home directory data. Resizing filesystem partitions takes a while, which is normal, but it went flawlessly.

The second big change I'm going to make is to switch my encrypted filesystems from Encfs to the eCryptfs-based file encryption standard Ubuntu has been developing. When released in Jaunty, last spring, Ubuntu provided users with an encrypted directory, Private/ , which existed alongside Documents/, Desktop/, Music/, etc., where users could move data they wanted to protect, and link to it from its previous location instead. This was pretty much what I'd developed for myself with Encfs, explicitly choosing what I want to protect. The big difference was that the eCryptfs system used the user's login password, rather than a separate one, to wrap the keys that unlocked the encrypted directory, meaning that the Private directory would already be mounted as soon as the user entered their password to login. With my Encfs setup, I had to enter a separate passphrase in an additional step.

But in this release, Ubuntu has continued to improve this system. Now a user's entire home directory can now be encrypted, rather than just the Private/ sub-folder. These two improvements on my Encfs setup go a long way toward making encrypted protection of user data seamlessly transparent, and it's a wonderful advance for the privacy of the Ubuntu OS.

As to the details of installation, I had ZERO problems. Sound just worked (Pulseaudio and all, which frustrated me so much previously that I uninstalled it entirely), networking just worked (Network Manager now grants more user control), the installation of restricted Nvidia graphics drivers just worked (complete with Compiz-powered OpenGL desktop effects eye candy), installation of restricted extras like the Adobe Flash plugin, and mp3 codecs just worked, and a few annoyances I'd been tolerating for years have now disappeared.

Furthermore, it's even snappier in performance. Nautilus file management, Firefox 3.5, and the gedit text editor all loaded and responded noticeably faster than on Jaunty. My boot time was 20 seconds to login, and an additional 15 seconds to desktop - not mind blowing, but definitely better than Jaunty on the same hardware.

I've also noticed something on my laptop - since I installed the Karmic beta on it, I've left it on for longer periods, and it has not tended to overheat, hang, or spontaneously shut off as much as it did on Jaunty. Advertised Improvements to power management seem to be contributing to this.

I'm just tickled pink - this is a very solid release.