The installer was created from the ISO downloaded from -  http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

We made the stick bootable using an existing Ubuntu 10:10 system - via the "Startup Disk Creator" application.

As always, we avoided performing an upgrade and instead did a "clean" install.

Booting up Ubuntu 11:10

There was one slight warning or error message that showed up right after the BIOS post , after Grub.  The boot process continued inspite of this error/warning.

We will look into this later and try to update accordingly.

Customizing Ubuntu 11:10

One of the first things that we do to NON-server Ubuntu boxes is to make it multi-media ready and friendly.  We do this by install the venerable  "ubuntu-restricted-extras" package group. Like so:

$ sudo apt-get install  ubuntu-restricted-extras

This will enable flash, mp3, encrypted DVD, java etc etc support.  This has been our little internal secret for a long while now.  But there you have it .... the secret is out now. Enjoy.

Installing software via apt-get ran into some trouble initially, but we quickly fixed these issues just because we are such kick-ass system admins at caffe*nix technologies.

Overall Impression

The default 3D desktop (Unity ?) was not terribly plesant to use initially.  It was slow to react to various actions. Not sure why yet... but we are still looking into this. It may have been a combination of our hardware, grapics processor, and because we didn't try tuning the system at all - because this was to be an out of the box test drive.

Getting out of 3D and using the 2D graphical environment made the system much more responsive and fun to use.

What Stood Out:

- btrfs as a file system option is now very prominent

- Issues with GPT labels for large drives were gracefully handled by the installer

- Nautilus or whatever the file manager being used in the 3D environment looks awkward but is very functional.

- The separate workspaces feature are not there by default

- Linux Kernel 3.0.0-12 out of the box.

- upstart service manager is still de-jour in the Ubuntu world ....and NOT systemd

- More to come in Part 2

Test Drive System Specs:

$ sudo lshw  -quiet -short -sanitize -enable cpuinfo -html
H/W path       Device      Class       Description
==================================================
system      System Product Name (To Be Filled By O.E.M.)
/0                         bus         M4A88T-M
/0/0                       memory      64KiB BIOS
/0/4                       processor   AMD Phenom(tm) II X2 550 Processor
/0/4/5                     memory      256KiB L1 cache
/0/4/6                     memory      1MiB L2 cache
/0/4/7                     memory      6MiB L3 cache
/0/33                      memory      2GiB System Memory
/0/33/0                    memory      DIMM [empty]
/0/33/1                    memory      DIMM [empty]
/0/33/2                    memory      2GiB DIMM Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/33/3                    memory      DIMM [empty]
/0/100                     bridge      RS880 Host Bridge
/0/100/1                   bridge      RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (int gfx)
/0/100/1/5                 display     RS880 [Radeon HD 4250]
/0/100/a                   bridge      RS780/RS880 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 5)
/0/100/a/0     eth0        network     RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
/0/100/11      scsi2       storage     SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [IDE mode]
/0/100/11/0    /dev/sda    disk        1TB WDC WD10EARS-00M