My computer was running just fine and dandy on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). I didn't really want to update to 10.04 (Lucid), because I had been hearing of people having problems with it. It is the long term realease though, so I figured once it had been out for awhile, it would become stable and be worth updating too. It does look much nicer. About the only real thing I didn't like about Karmic was the drab brown appearance.

I did a fresh install of Lucid on someone elses computer and it really does look good. It works well too, so I thought that it was time to run an update on my system. The long and short of it, is that the update didn't work, and after some tinkering (It became completely broken, with no desktop, just full screen terminal.) I managed to get it working in a fashion. It had the appearance of Lucid, but was also largely still Karmic. I call it Ubuntu Karmic/Lucid 10.01. A sort of 50/50 Karmic/Lucid hybrid. It mostly worked pretty well, with a bit more tinkering, but Cinelerra stopped working altogether, along with a few other problems that seemed insurmountable.

So, over the last couple of days I have shifted all of the importan data and files onto a seperate hard drive, reformatted the hard drive and done a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. Then spent an entire night downloading and installing all of the audio/video/graphics programs that I use (bigger than the operating system itself) and transfered all of the data and files back onto the computer. It appears to be working well now, though I suspect there will be some more minor tinkering over the next few days, as I stumble accross things that I had forgotten to do. Firefox, for instance needs to have the plugins added (fire-bug, fire-ftp, etc) and set up again.

All in all though, I'm pleased that I did it, as I now have a clean and stable system that should last me the next two and a half years. And as an added bonus, it seems that printing with my Brother 4040cn colour laser printer is now working properly. Something that hadn't been able to get working properly on Linux before.

Neither Mac OSX or Windows can do as much by themselves as my new Ubuntu Linux OS can do.