Well, in preparation for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) to arrive, I did what I normaly do, I installed Tribe 5 on my backup machine (Compaq Presario V2000), just to test for any glaring bugs or upgrade problems, and if all goes well, I upgrade on my main machine (IBM T60). I do this, so when the final release comes out, I have less to download when the servers are slow.
So, the upgrade to Gusty on my Compaq was a breeze, no hitches, everything works fine. It's pretty neat being an early adopter and watching the new version take shape with every update you do. So after a few weeks, once the update were less dramatic, I plugged in my T60, and did the upgrade. I was a little suspicious with it, as it seemed that Metacity was messed up while the update was in progress, however, I assumed that it would right itself after a reboot. After the update had completed, and I had restarted my computer, things started off badly. As it would start booting, it would reach a stage, an then print out endless '[xxxxxxxx] Device Mapper: dm-linear: Device lookup failed'. After looking around the internet for a few minutes, I determined that this is related to LVM, which I didn't use (I had a similar error when upgrading to Feisty with mdadm). I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and it continued to boot as normal. The fix I did to make things work properly was to 'apt-get remove evms'. After fixing that and rebooting, I had X11 issues, where it would try to launch gdm, fail, then try again, so it was tough getting to a virtual terminal to fix the problem (there were two Display 1's with different resolutions), however, the tool to change these settings is much nicer now, and can help setup external monitors, which previously needed to happen through a xorg.conf edit.
So, life is good now, Compiz is working great (though I can't get it to use the cube setting), as is the new Thunderbird. There are still some bugs to be worked out, (my sshd crashed, along with a number of gnome applets), but I think that this release will really help push Linux out onto the desktop market.
Peace and chow,
ranok