I decided to testdrive Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 (10.04) over the weekend and installed it in parallel to my current version of Karmic (9.10).  It replaced the latest release of Fedora I had tried out.

The install went smoothly.  I manually created a new partition for the base of (/ and /var) and mounted my karmic /home and /opt without reformatting them.   The install was smooth and quick.  The most time seems to be in installing all the language packs.  No idea why it just does not install the ones I am using.

After a reboot Grub prompted for which version to run (Lucid or Karmic).  Very impressed.   Booted into Lucid and have basically not left since.

First Impressions

I loved the much quicker boot time. Karmic had some major improvements but booting on my laptop still gave a sort of clunky feeling. Lucid Alpha 3 boots smoothly with a very smooth transition from the initial splash screen to the GDM login window.

Video: I have a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 video card which did not work very well in Karmic. I got a 1920 x 1080 screen fine in Karmic but video playback was very scratchy. In Lucid Alpha 3 the video is great out of the box with Video playback much improved.

Software Center: is somewhat improved and easy to use to install or remove software. I admit I still prefer Synaptic, simply because it feels easier, but this may be just because I am used to using it.

Music Store is not yet available but there is a link for it in Rhythmbox. Looking forward to seeing this liven up. I actually have my iphone working with Rhythmbox in Karmic with the installation of some extra software and a PPA repository. In Lucid Alpha 3 Rhythmbox recognises my iphone and see the music.

Simple Scanner is a new neat little scanning tool. Seems to work fine but I reinstall xsane which I am used to using and allows me to fine tune my scans.

RebootsI do get the occasional logouts with is apparently caused by a conflict between gdm and plymouth. Removing plymouth solved this problem for now but I have left it in to see when it get fixed - this is an Alpha release after all and feedback is important.

Post install

Post install I usually go through and install the software I personally use. Now that GIMP is not longer installed I had to install in manually as well as other software such as bluefiish, conky, gftp, xsane , chromium web browser, thunderbird for email, virtualbox, scribus, gnome-shell and picaso which I use to organise my photos.

Overall all my old setting were picked up without a problem and the installed thunderbird found my existing profile for mail, chromuim found my bookmarks etc and virtualbox found my virtual machines just fine. It all just worked.

Conclusion

For an Alpha release I was very pleased with the result. The Ubuntu and Debian teams have done a great job with the software and it is pleasing to see the general improvements in this upcoming release.