Usually I am aware of the latest version of the Ubuntu operating system arriving a little before it's release time. This is mainly because there is some new feature that I am hanging out to try or bug that I want to leave behind.

This time around I've been happily using Ubuntu 10.04 and didn't even notice that that 10.10 was out until a chance visit to ubuntu.com's front page.

I was at work when I found out that 10.10 was out so I ssh'd into my home computer running 10.04 and did:

# to get repository updates
sudo apt-get update 
# had to use the -d option to pick up the new release
sudo do-release-upgrade -d

And after some warnings about the dangers of doing a remote upgrade I was feeling like taking a risk so I said yes to all the prompts and after downloading 1400MB of updates and remotely rebooting. I had a working Ubuntu 10.10 installation.

So after happily using 10.04 for the past 6 months, I've moved seemlessly to 10.10. Well done to the Ubuntu folks. Especially because I am running an old computer (a P4 with 2GBRAM).

Fonts
The first thing I noticed was a beautiful new default font named `Ubuntu' It is actually reminiscent of a Windows font named `Trebuchet MS'. But it is definitely different and looks great.

Improvements in things I use
The new network-manager-pptp (used to connect to the default Windows VPN Server) has more smarts. You don't have to deselect all the authentication methods as in the past, it know's for PPTP that you only want MSCHAP and MSCHAPv2.

Everything that I use seems to Just Work™

It's all becoming so nicely integrated... Thanks to the Ubuntu Team!