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What do you think, does it worth it to upgrade to 12.04?

Preinstalled 10.04 works very well. I am thinking about performance issues, I would have the 12.04 as on my bigger machines but don't know how it will run on a Netbook

Any ideas, experiences?

4 Answers 4

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How about trying the new version by booting from USB a couple of times without doing a full blown complete install? This way you can play around and see if there are any driver (or other) issues.

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  • Note: I have a Dell Mini 10v with 11.04 and did not try 12.04 yet. Apr 27, 2012 at 12:27
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According to this article in Phoronix (see page 6), the boot time for a Dell Mini 9 increases from 20 seconds on 10.04 to 50 seconds on 12.04. The Dell Mini used to be the reference system for tuning the boot process back in 2010, but it's not any more, so this may not mean that the system is slower overall, only that its boot process has been optimized for newer machines.

If your Dell Mini has a 4GiB SDD, I believe Ubuntu 12.04 will simply refuse to install.

Other than that, an upgrade is beneficial in that you end up with software at its latest version. Also bear in mind that support for 10.04 ends in a year's time, so if your Dell Mini is likely to live past that point you should eventually update to 12.04.

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I agree with everything the previous poster said, but would like to add a couple of points. Very probably 12.04 will have better battery life, there has been a lot of attention to that aspect on this release and 10.04 was criticized for less than stellar battery life. And the Unity and Gnome3 desktops available on 12.04 are quite reasonable choices for a little netbook, much as I hate them on a regular desktop.

That said, I'm keeping 10.04 on my Dell Mini (I have kubuntu) and 10.04 on my AcerOne that I'm typing on now until support is dropped in a year. These machines generally live near a plug and I LOVE the 10 sec boot up times. I've never had anything like it on any OS and any hardware, even my 6 core desktop. In a year when Lucid stops being supported I'll do fresh installs, either of 12.04 or 13.04 or perhaps the newly minted Debian 7 if that is shaped up nicely. At that point 12.04 will have 4 years of support left and Debian stable will have about 3 years, that should nurse these netbooks to the end of their active life.

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Definitely, you should upgrade your Dell mini from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS, it works okay!

My experience in upgrade process from 10.04 to 12.04 was not smooth, I was using alternate 12.04 iso image to upgrade (offline upgrade), but because my Dell mini was also installed with packages from various PPAs (particularly GIS stuff), the upgrade process was refused to continue with specific error message saying that the upgrade can not calculate the size of packages to upgrade, something like that.

So, I take a short cut, make a clean install (yes! using the same alternate iso which burned to bootable usb). And it works!

I am happy 12.04 user now, and everything works, like wireless, sound, bluetooth, video cam etc, even Rythmbox works better compared to when run in 10.04. And for sure power management in 12.04 is flawless, like: when you're running out of battery power, the system will to refuse to activate when you push power button, until you connected to AC power, but you're not losing your previous work, because the system is not actually shutdown! it just like a normal system suspend in action. And I should say, I love Unity...

On performance side, I can log in using Ubuntu 3D but the Intel Atom processor seems to work better when I log in using Ubuntu 2D, which I don't mind at all.

hope this help!

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