On the Hardy Heron box, my 8GB virtual disk is divvied up and used like so:

Filesystem      1K-blocks      Used  Available  Use%  Mounted on

/dev/sda1         7913216   2706712    4807692   37%  /

varrun             127840       100     127740    1%  /var/run

varlock            127840         0     127840    0%  /var/lock

udev               127840        44     127796    1%  /dev

devshm             127840        12     127828    1%  /dev/shm

lrm                127840     39780      88060   32%  /lib/modules/2.6.24-21.generic/volatile

gvfs-fuse-daemon  7913216   2706712    4807692   37%  /home/david/.gvfs

Intrepid Ibex shows the following mapping and usage:

Filesystem      1K-blocks      Used  Available  Use%  Mounted on

/dev/sda1         7850996   2278572    5173612   31%  /

tmpfs              127324         0     127324    0%  /lib/init/rw

varrun             127324       100     127224    1%  /var/run

varlock            127324         0     127324    0%  /var/lock

udev               127324      2604     127720    1%  /dev

tmpfs              127324        12     127312    1%  /dev/shm

lrm                127324      2000     125324    2%  /lib/modules/2.6.27-7.generic/volatile

There's three things which immediately jump out.

Firstly, Intrepid Ibex uses more disk space out-of-the-box.

Secondly, Hardy Heron's gvfs virtual filesystem does not appear to be running by default under Intrepid Ibex.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Hardy Heron is running Linux kernel 2.6.24-21 while Intrepid Ibex is running Linux kernel 2.6.27-7.

This last point is confirmed by the command uname -a which reports

Linux dmwvm 2.6.24-21-generic #1 SMP Tue Oct 21 23:43:45 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

for Hardy Heron, and the following for Intrepid Ibex:

Linux dmwvm 2.6.27-7-generic #1 SMP Thu Oct 30 04:18:38 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

We thus have our first major point of differentiation between Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10. The former does not include the latest Linux kernel and will not upgrade to it, via Update Manager at least - you can certainly build the kernel manually yourself - whereas this ships with the new Ubuntu incarnation.

Mind you, that version number change is so teensie tiny - from 2.6.24-21 to 2.6.27-7 ... are we talking about just an insignificant jump? Well, the answer is yes and no.

CONTINUED