Ubuntu 6.10* (a.k.a. Edgy) was released yesterday to great fanfare.

Edgy is a “minor release”, while their last release, 6.06 (a.k.a. Dapper) is known as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. The LTS releases are “supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on servers.” However, for those of us who like the cutting edge, and the slight pain that goes along with upgrades every new months instead of every few years, Edgy seems to be worth it.

The biggest additions to Edgy are the release of Firefox 2 (I highly recommend you Windows users download this now.), Gnome 2.16, and OpenOffice 2.0.4.

Depending on how you look at it, the upgrade was easy, but the only problem I had would have been disastrous for the average user. After running the upgrade steps, for some reason Xorg, the Windows Manager, never loaded. So, I was stuck with a system with no Windows. Thankfully, the fix was a simple command to add to the Xorg package (“aptitude install xserver-xorg”), but I’m sure this would have panicked any home user.

Oh, well… in their defense, I’ve never seen an easy OS upgrade, even with Windows. So, for anyone in my vicinity, my offer still stands. I will come over and convert your system from Windows to Ubuntu, and support your transition. You have nothing to lose but all the spyware, adware, and viruses that are part of the Windows world.

* A quick note about version numbers. The pre-dot number is the year the version was released minus 2000 (in the case of Edgy, it’s 2006 – 2000 = 6). The post-dot number is the release month, in this case November. Ubuntu has so far been very committed to their release dates.