Many of Linux users waited for that day. 26th of April 2012. The day when Canonical released their Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. The day, when Unity became the only available desktop environment for the current long-term support version of Ubuntu. The day has come. Let me see what it brought to us. Canonical stuck to the classical ISO image size this time: only 700 Mb, which is just fine to be burnt onto CD. As usual, there are several options available, either in terms of the system (32- and 64 bit, desktop and server, text-only and graphical installation), or in terms of downloading options (direct download from a mirror or using a torrent). I chose 32-bit desktop version and used torrent this time. Downloading of ISO image from the torrent was not a big problem. Initial downloading speed was low, but I guess that was an issue of the last mile, i.e. my connection to the provider. Soon that problem was resolved, and I got my own ISO image of the Ubuntu 12.04 operating system. This time the image was burnt onto the CD-R disk, because I was fulfilling orders which came via my eBay site and via Buy Linux CDs page. I usually quickly test each CD for the ability to boot and to run few programs. That's why I decided to use one of those CDs to get my own picture of Ubuntu 12.04. So, CD is in the drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from optical drive. Let's go! Booting the systemThe first screen which I saw soon after the boot was about the choice between Try Ubuntu and Install Ubuntu. Same screen features selection of available languages. If you remember, Ubuntu 12.04 is not the first Ubuntu release to feature this method of booting the Live CD image. Of course, my choice was for the Try Ubuntu option. While I am talking about the system boot, I'd like to mention that I also tried to boot my other laptop HP Compaq nc6000 with Ubuntu 12.04 CD. Unfortunately, I was not able to do so. I got an error about absence of pae support in my processor. This is the requirement for Ubuntu. I recently got the same issue with pae when tried to install CentOS on the very same computer. It has Celeron processor of one of the first generations, which were produced without pae. Coming back to my Live run. The total boot time of Ubuntu 12.04 Live CD was significant. It was not the longest I've ever seen, but much more than I expected - about 5 minutes to the final desktop. The most of that time was spent before the Try/Install selection. Ubuntu 12.04 desktop with System Monitor Freshly booted Ubuntu 12.04 operating system took astonishing 310 Mb of memory. That's more than I expected. DesktopThe default desktop wallpaper in Ubuntu 12.04

read more: Ubuntu 12.04: A Stairway To Heaven?