First, I tried to do an upgrade normally with Update Manager. I stopped it because due to a slow Internet connection, it was taking too long. Then, I decided to do a fresh install. Before this, Windows XP was on the 35 GB hard disk, and GNU/Linux was on the 16 GB hard disk. I decided to move Windows to the 16 GB HDD and GNU/Linux to the 35 GB HDD, because I store my data on the GNU/Linux partition and I was running out of free space with the 16 GB HDD.

I backed up my data to the Windows partition, installed a new installation of Windows XP on the 16 GB HDD, moved my backup there, then used UNetbooin to install Xubuntu 9.10 on the 35 GB HDD.

It installed perfectly fine. The only major problem I had was that GRUB2 could not boot into Windows "out of the box". I eventually got it to boot into the Windows partition, but then I ran into problems with Windows itself booting. As of this writing I am still trying to fix it. Also, there has been a problem with the swap partition not activating automatically at boot (I must activate it manually with swapon), but I uncommented a line in /etc/fstab and I will see if it worked at next reboot.

The improvements I noticed were:

• It takes only about a minute to boot
• Login/XFCE startup is faster
• Halt/reboot takes only about 10–20 seconds

So far, I am satisfied with Karmic.