I’ve upgraded two desktop computers to the 64bit release of Ubuntu 10.4 in the last week. One was a fresh install (my desktop at the office, a Dell Optiplex 755) and the other was an in-place upgrade (my desktop at home, a Dell Optiplex 760 with dual monitors). Aside from the new color scheme (yuck), I’m pretty happy with 10.4. So far nothing has broken, crashed, or regressed in any way that I’ve noticed. I was able to easily drop the latest versions of VirtualBox and Google Chrome (the only 3rd party packages I really use) without issue. The most noticeable change so far has to be the boot speed. Both machines go from hitting the Enter key at the Grub menu to a usable desktop in a remarkably short amount of time.
The irony is that since these are Linux desktops, I really don’t reboot them that often. But this means that when I have the confidence to upgrade my laptop, which I do reboot more often, things will definitely feel better. And that also applies to any 10.4 virtual machines I run too. The most interesting question is whether I can get away with all 64bit installs. This is 2010, after all, so I’d like to make use of all this memory. But the VPN client at work has been the limiting factor so far. Thankfully there appears to be a solution on the horizon for that.
I’ve been running the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Samsung NC10, so I’m curious to try the Ubuntu 10.4 Netbook Edition on it soon as well. Anyone tried it?
Jeremy Zawodny's blog 
I installed it in my “old” Acer One (512MB/SSD) and works like a charm. My daughter found a purplpe theme or something like that, that took away the “Despressive Donkey” look and feel 😉 You owe us a full Redis/CL post… 😦
What VPN client do you use? If it is Cisco/Juniper based then there is an open source client included in Ubuntu – search for the vpnc package. It is even integrated with network manager!
Roger,
It is the Juniper “Network Connect” client. I managed to get it working under both 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu as of Friday (finally).
I’ll try out the vpnc package and see if that works. This is the first I’ve heard of that working with the Juniper VPN, but it’s certainly worth a try.
We’re trying to move to OpenVPN someday, which will make all this pointless hassle go away. I cannot wait. 😉
Coincidentally I used to work for Juniper up till 4 years ago and used 64 bit Linux back then too, plus this solution for corporate intranet access. At that time there was also a Java applet based version that did port forwarding. For example you could configure it so that port 1234 on localhost was forwarded to an ip address and port number of your choosing on the corporate network. Not as seamless as a proper VPN client, but it did work. In my case it also gave me far better control over name resolution and which connections went straight out over the internet vs via the the corporate network.
An alternate interim solution may be using ssh. You can setup a VPN using recent ssh versions, and not as port forwarding but rather actual network interfaces on both ends.
I’ve installed the 10.4 Netbook Edition on my NC10 and it works very well. The gui package manager doesn’t seem to be quite right – it doesn’t seem to know about installed packages, but the apt-get command line utility is fine. As you point out, the boot times are brilliant 🙂
Did you have any issues with hardware drivers for 10.4 64bit?
I’m somewhat in the same boat with a newly arrived Win7 64bit notebook and wondering if I’m going to make my life miserable by trashing it for Ubuntu. Main aim would be to have it as a host with most of my work being done in VM’s – but will they be able to access the hardware?