Ubuntu 10.04 imminent

Now many people may think being a little excited about a new release is just plain daft.
However, having seen some fun and games with Windows 7 and the fact I've not used Windows now for a good 2 years and I'm happy this is providing me an alternative that suits my needs.

Even my own team at work who have had Windows 7 installed have had amusing fun, one lasted 10 minutes from turning on his newly built machine to find it blue screen in front of him, finger print readers fail to work, bit locker security is causing us issues so we've had to turn it off, security programs won't work properly, our Cisco soft phones won't work properly and so on.

Don't get me wrong, Windows 7 when it's all sorted should be fine but lots of hardware fails to work, drivers are not working and so on.

So keeping my home computers on Ubuntu is a good choice and one I'm going to stick with, I even got a HP mini note 2133 working on Ubuntu 9.10 last week including the wireless (which was a bit tricky to get working on 9.04) and it runs perfectly.

so 10.04 is imminent, I've installed it on a virtual machine but also ran the live CD on some units and it looks the best release so far.
Fast boot up times (not that 9.04/9.10 were slow), added features like Gwibber (a social networking client to connect you to twitter, facebook etc) and lots of bits just fiddled with and generally made all shiny.

My laptop running 9.10 has given no problems at all, originally it had 8.10, then 9.04 then 9.10 and not a single crash ever.
My file server runs 9.10 and again has never crashed or locked up, my media PC is running 9.10 and again no lock ups or problems and so on.

Compared to Windows the housekeeping is far less, the stability far higher and things like on line banking are less stressful.

If you have some older hardware that might not work well on Vista and Windows 7 is not running too well then this is the way to go, my next steps are to try OpenVZ, the virtualization software that can run as a modified Ubuntu core with better distribution of resources than VMware on PC etc, and perhaps make some virtual containers so I can try several virtual machines running at once.

One chap has even had 1000 virtual machines running at once on OpenVZ so it's worth a look.

I'll get the full 10.04 installed on April 10th then will rant and rave on here.

So far it looks like more fun than a bus full of 20 year old Nuns all high on alcohol and drugs.