Installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 on the laptop

While the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 1 release is yet to happen I decided to go with the Alpha 3. I could have waited for the Beta 1 which was originally scheduled for release yesterday but apparently is supposed to be released today, but I felt that I would loose yet another day not being able to work on Analytics 4 Android.

So I jumped in at the deep end and installed Alpha 3.

(all photos taken with an HTC Hero mobile phone

apologies for the quality.)

I installed the standard version without any manual selection of options, etc.

The system started booting from the live CD

The graphic install tool (looks much like the 9.10 Karmic Koala version) guided me through installation (pictures missing). As this machine is a dual boot I had to modify the partition scheme manually but apart from that everything else was default setup.

Finally the process was done and the machine was rebooted:

GRUB loads and displays the above menu for 10 seconds. If Ubuntu was installed on a fresh drive without any other Operating Systems, this boot menu would have been hidden.

The "Windows NT/2000/XP (on /dev/sda1)" is the laptop manufacturers recovery partition and the "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (on /dev/sda2)" is the Windows OS that came with the machine. For various reasons we need this OS in our family and thus it stayed on the hard drive.

When you log in to your Lucid Lynx Alpha 3, this is how your desktop looks like. For the most part it looks like Karmic Koala, maybe with the exception of the "me" menu next to the power symbol (log on/off menu) in the top right corner:

This menu gives access to the social media, like twitter, FaceBook and other chat accounts as well as Ubuntu One.

I like to modify my desktop so that I get a little more desktop real estate, so I usually remove the bottom panel. To retain the same info on just one panel, I exchange the Main Menu Bar for a Main Menu and add the Window Selector, Trash Can and Workspace Switcher from the lower panel to the upper panel. I also add the System Monitor with all six meters showing (CPU, Memory, Network, Swap, Load Avg and Disk).

The theme and background pictures in this release seem to be the old Karmic ones, but it was only recently that the new themes and backgrounds was released:

As my laptop's built-in wifi is with a Broadcomm chip set that is not supported out-of-the-box (because of copyright policies) I had to install this driver through a "wired" net connection, in this case my HTC Hero Android based mobile phone, which was recognized out-of-the-box. Having done this and rebooted I could do a apt-get update/apt-get upgrade which in my case was 528 packages demanding about 240 MBytes downloaded.

I now need to add the extra packages I need. I will return in a few days with an update. If the Beta 1 is released later today I will re-install that (but keeping my /home) during the weekend and post that story.