Karmic install

System install: 20 minutes
Email config: 4 hours

Finally I upgraded to Karmic Koala, the latest cuddly incarnation of Ubuntu. Only four months late to the party, my reasons for the upgrade were more to do with things breaking rather than any positive feature (namely an SFTP connection in Nautilus bringing the whole of Nautilus down to its knees. Oh, and Firefox only running in the background and not displaying any windows. I've been using System Monitor to kill these rogue processes but it isn't an ideal situation).

In my naïvety, I believed that copying over my preferences would suffice. Alas no, Evolution email doesn't play ball. For future ref, make sure you use the File > Backup Settings… feature.

Installing Ubuntu was a breeze - 5 minutes to reboot and configure, 15 minutes for the actual installation.

Retrieving my calendars and email was a drag - about 4 hours of manual intervention and editing VCard text files. Ugh!