www.ubuntu.com

Important changes for me:

Fully functional Flash 10 player in the 64-bit environment and the ability to have your system be nearly 100% encrypted (all except /boot ) system using the standard installation Live-CD (simply select LVM encrypted when you partition.)

Downloading now.

The most important change for me is the inclusion of a working, open-source 3D driver for R500+ Radeon cards. fglrx sucked.

The liveUSB thing is pretty good too.

If I backup my entire /home folder onto a usb HDD then clean install and recopy my /home folder, I'll have all my previous settings, but in the new 8.10 system right? Will I lose some tweeks that the new config files would have?

...I wouldn't recommend it. The config files you copy might not work with the new versions of stuff (mine broke when I tried during the Alpha phase). If you have to, just copy the non-hidden folders in your /home, i.e. the ones with your documents but not config files.

Actually, why couldn't you use the automatic upgrade? It'll come through Update Manager soon and upgrade you without losing any of your documents.

Use the update manager. It will save you some pain.

I want to use the LVM encryption of the HDD (filesystem and SWAP). Although, this system is a 1.67GHz system. Is that too slow in your opinion to have full real-time encryption without a performance hit?

Also, when I clean installed my Laptop with the release candidate, it gave me all sorts of new eye candy that didn't occur when I upgraded this desktop with the release candidate. So I'm thinking some new options don't get selected when you do an upgrade.

EDIT: There is no real pain involved. I only really want to save my progress in Metal Blob Solid and Pingus. I guess I should just find the save files. All email is IMAP based, so I don't even have to back that up.

Actually, that depends on your graphics card. Which is your desktop card? If Ubuntu doesn't have a driver that supports the eye candy on that card, it won't enable by default.

My laptop is a 64-bit system from last year. It's graphic card is not supported in the 64-bit (ATI). It is the one that received additional eye candy from a fresh install of the Release candidate.

The desktop is from 2003 has a 1.67 GHz i686 CPU and an integrated graphics card. No visuals changed when I used sudo do-release-upgrade to force it to use the release candidate.

Ubuntu.com is now changed so it gives 8.10.

Can't wait to install it.
>Dogs Rule: back when installed Ubuntu 5.10, I put /home on a dedicated partition, and I never looked back.

Maybe I'll do that when I do a fresh install, but how is that better than just backing it up to an external HDD and pasting it back in?

I was going to say welcome to the site, but you've been here for 11 months. :)