Alright, this posting isn’t going to be long. I’ve been running myself ragged lately.
So Ubuntu 9.10 (hereafter Karmic Koala) was released in late October. I was anxiously awaiting it for my Acer Aspire D250 netbook. I also wanted it because a number of packages were out of dates, even in backports, and I tend to be kind of lazy about having to rebuild packages from scratch unless there is a good reason.
I did a fresh install of Karmic and, voila!, things didn’t work completely well. For one, the wireless LAN (Broadcom) didn’t work out of the box, whereas in 9.04 (Jaunty) it did. This is because Jaunty, seemingly, was picking up the restricted Broadcom driver by default (a good thing). Not so in Karmic. There were many other things not to like (from my p.o.v.) including the default selection of an “ext4″ filesystem. So I decided to go back to 9.04 and attempt a distribution upgrade (via Update Manager).
Going this route allows you to stick with what is known to work, and works well. Ubuntu 9.04 does work reasonably well on many netbooks, especially if you install the restricted backports to replace certain drivers (Atheros in particular). But you will likely want to take the plunge and upgrade to 9.10, especially if you are doing development work (e.g. Mercurial is way out of date on 9.04).
Happy hacking!