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.
