I made the leap from Windows to Ubuntu this week. I ran a test install of the system using the Wubi Installer and decided I liked it enough to make the switch more permanent. Yesterday, I backed up all my files and overwrote my Windows setup with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and spent a little while installing programs, updating software, and putting my Windows install into Virtualbox. Overall, I’m really happy with it. It’s faster and lighter than even Windows 7, and I feel like installing software is, for the most part, simpler than Windows. (There are exceptions, of course.)

One of the things that I like most, though, is that if something breaks in Ubuntu, it’s pretty easy to fix — if you know what to do, or how to find out what to do. For example, I woke up this morning to discover that Ubuntu wouldn’t boot; or, more specifically, it would get to the splash screen and hang there indefinitely. No amount of restarting would fix the problem, so I grabbed my iPhone and did a little Googling around until I found a solution. I’m a Linux newbie, so I had no idea that you can hold the Shift when Ubuntu is loading up to access the grub menu and choose different Linux kernels to load. Doing this let me go back to the 2.6.32-21 kernel, which works fine, and make repairs to my install from there. A little more hunting around revealed that the 2.6.32-22 kernel is problematic for some users, particularly with users who attempt to hibernate their laptops by closing the lid, which I had happened to do last night. (Oops. Won’t be doing that one again.)

Ultimately, what I ended up doing was going into the Synaptic Package Manager and just removing the 2.6.32-22 kernel completely. I’m hesitant to try upgrading it again because I don’t want to run the risk of recreating the problem, even if I do know how to fix it now.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has run into problems with the 2.6.32-22 kernel and what, if anything, you did to fix the problem.

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