Moving to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on my Macbook 2,1

I'm the happy owner/user of a Macbook (a 2,1 to be exact) since a few years. Actually it is company property, but since I'm the only user they let me run whatever I like. Which happens to be Ubuntu.

It was really Willem who set me on to this; I don't think I would have had the guts to do this to my Mac if he hadn't been adamant that it would work. And it does! It did require quite a few tweaks, though, as the Ubuntu community page testifies.

But overall I was happily running 9.10 (Karmic); I learned to live with the few quirks, like having to log off every time I came into work and attached the external monitor (it would crash the video driver if I didn't). And suspend/resume was just really slow.

Now that Lucid is just around the corner, and after my previous success with installing it on my wife's new desktop, I got feisty and tried it on the Mac. First, I used the live CD and that worked so splendidly that I just had to do the actual upgrade. It lasted all night, but in the end it worked like a charm.

So it's worth at this point to make a few notes.

• The new theme did not appear the first time I booted. This was to be expected because I did an upgrade, not a fresh install. Most things should preferably stay as they were.
• The ssh-agent environment variables were gone from my terminal shells. Why? I don't know, but a somewhat related bug report suggests the use of the keychain package.
• Thunderbird 3.0 is chugging away on indexing all my mail. I could turn it off but I think I'll let it run for a while and check out the new search capability.
• Sound didn't immediately work on the live CD but this was resolved by killing the pulseaudio daemon. Sound does work after the upgrade.
• The volume and brightness buttons work too. Very nice.
• Attaching the external monitor turns off the desktop effects. This may be related to the crash bug I mentioned earlier. But you can turn it back on right after.
  

That's it for now, more news later!