Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my IBM Thinkpad R50e

I decided to upgrade from 9.04 to 10.04 LTS the other day. I was hoping the installation will be smooth. However, the installation suddenly stopped after a few minutes with the display going blank and disk activity stopping. After some googling, I found out that is a bug that occurs in systems with Intel graphics adapters. I found a workaround here. Specifically, I switched to VESA as the graphics driver to use during the installation by passing some options to the kernel.

I used the following partitioning scheme:
/ - 10GB
/home - 5GB
/opt - 3GB
swap - 500MB

The next step then is to customize the installation and add additional software. Before that, I need configure the dual screen setup. Since VESA does not support dual screen, I need to change the driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to "intel".  However, this causes the system to hang. The workaround I followed is to use a kernel from Karmic(2.6.31-20-generic). Installing a new kernel is new to me since 10.04 uses GRUB2 and there is no longer /boot/grub/menu.lst.

The following are the initial packages I installed to get a functioning system ready for work:
*Acrobat Reader (for reading journal articles)
*Thunderbird (for email)
*Flash Plug-in (for watching great table tennis matches)
*MPlayer and gecko-mediaplayer (for listening to RJ100)
*VLC (for watching Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother)
*GYachE (for allowing me to see "invisible" people in YM)
*build-essential,qemu,nasm (for OS programming stuff)
*Subversion (for checking out source code of projects)
*vpnc (for allowing me to connect to ICS VPN)
*GVim (may favorite text editor)
*XAMPP (I use this for PHP and MySQL programming instead of the packages from Ubuntu itself)

So far, my 10.04 experience is great!