Worried when 10.04lts goes end of life

[Colin Law]

On 27 November 2011 08:53, Alex Cockell <alex at acockell.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I'm worried now. In order to sidestep Windows Vista, I have bought both my
> Thinkpad R61i and Ideapad S12 preinstalled with Ubuntu from Linux Emporium.
> i have therefore never installed Linux myself, only accepted updates and LTS
> upgrades as required. i now hear that the user environment has completely
> changed, and I risk having my machines bricked when 12.04.1 comes around...
> Or the learning curve completely changes. Why has this happened? I've tried
> reading through some opf the info on "unity" whatever that is.. And this
> rthing with "docks"... I've always used the Taskbar...

No need to panic, 10.04 will be supported till April 2013 [1].  There
is plenty of time for things to settle down before then.  Also there
is no way your existing machines will be 'bricked' even then, they
will not suddenly stop working, it is just that there will not be
updates available.

In the meantime if you can pick up an old PC from somewhere then you
could easily install the current Ubuntu on it and try it out without
any danger of messing up your working machines.  Then over the next 18
months you can make your mind up about what to do when the time comes.
 It is possible of course to 'dual boot' one of your existing machines
by installing the latest Ubuntu on it in addition to the existing one
and you can then select which you want at boot time, but if you are
nervous about that then using a separate machine may be the way to go.
 A 10GB disk and 512MB RAM is sufficient, though 1GB RAM is better.
Another possibility is to use VirtualBox on your PC to install the
latest Ubuntu in a virtual machine to try it out.

Colin

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases