I just installed Oneiric beta-1 64 bit on one of my machines. As promised, the beta has the new 3.0.x kernel, which includes the driver for the wireless card in this laptop.

I installed BOINC from the Oneiric repository, and got 6.12.33 as expected. It also automatically included ia32-libs and a few other libraries as part of the BOINC installation. That should save some folks with 64 bit Ubuntu some head-scratching.

Oneiric is supposed to improve the performance of 32-bit applications on 64-bit machines. I'll be very interested to see whether that happens -- and is enough to be noticeable with BOINC applications.

I don't like the Oneiric user interface. But it was nice to just install the os and not have to go through downloading, patching, and installing a wireless driver. And I'm very curious about computing speed. I'm expecting to encounter some problems since this is just a beta release, but I didn't want to wait 6 weeks for the final release to try this out.

This is a dual boot laptop. I'm about to undertake a Windows vs Oneiric speed comparison on DSFL. When that's done, I'll run some C4CW under Oneiric to see whether they're any faster than they were under Natty.

The Oneiric beta definitely is a beta! Installing the first set of updates brought a faulty version of a program that controls communication among components of Unity. In shades of our recent WCG beta, it would seize control of 1 CPU core, run at 100%, overheat machines, and refuse to die. Uninstalling it disabled Unity (and there no longe ris a Gnome 2 to fall back on). The developers seem to have sorted that one out, but they are not kidding that this version is for testing, not production.

Do you think the 32bit improvement attempts are intended to improve BD performance, and not necessarily all core types?

I have been struggling with 11.04 for a while. I don't think it supports the new Z68 chipset fully, or Asus's implementation of it on the P8 Z68-V Pro board. The updates basically kill the OS on reboot (elf magic errors), and repairs while sort of working occasionally tend to leave me with what is definitely not the 11.04 interface. More like 10.04. Never had to reboot a system from the motherboard before; Ubuntu does not recognize the board as being able to restart, so I have to remove the case and press the restart or power button on the board itself.

I think the issue might be to do with graphics. Tried a GTX470 and an HD 5850 as well as the Intel graphics (seemed to work best). Anyway looking forward to a more stable Ubuntu for this rig.

Say, is anyone crunching under Lubuntu?

I stumbled on Lubuntu this evening so have had less than an hour of experience with it, but so far I like what I see, expecially for crunching. The first sentence at
lubuntu.net
says "lubuntu is a faster, more lightweight and energy saving variant of Ubuntu using LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment." Sounds like just what I want in a crunching machine.

I picked up today's build of the 11.10-equivalent lubuntu from
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/daily-live/current/

So far I'm just running Lubuntu off a flashdrive with a persistent file structure. It boots from this drive in under a minute (compared to 7 minutes for Ubuntu 11.10 beta from a live flashdrive -- I don't know why pre-release Ubuntu boots so painfully slowly in the "try Ubuntu" mode). Lubuntu's desktop is like a slightly stripped-down Gnome 2.0 -- I could find everything immediately menus, and getting a terminal window was instantaneous.

The Synaptic package manager is installed by default (not that glitzy Ubuntu Software Center that doesn't let you see what version of a package you're installing). BOINC 6.12.33 was in the repository. I could also install the AMD Catalyst proprietary video driver I wanted from Synaptic.

Warning: I started a couple of WCG WUs running, and they did not save on the persistent flashdrive when I shut down. (Sorry, wingmen!) All my other settings were retained.

Edited to add: I don't think the problem with saving WUs in BOINC was lubuntu's fault. I had installed BOINC under Oneiric on a different flashdrive earlier in the day. I think the fact that I had swapped 2 different flashdrives with similar operating systems, both with BOINC on them, in and out of the same machine, completely confused the WCG server. I see that some of the WUs detached by the project.

@SekeRob
http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q210/Sekerob/WCGYearsPi1Project.png has HCMD error "#####".