Fun with upgrades - not

[Phil Holmes]

Last week I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 to a 
more recent version.  I downloaded an upgrade to 12.04, and then used that 
to do an online upgrade to 14.04.  As a result of this, I lost most of the 
applications needed to build LilyPond.  I've grabbed a number of then with 
the software installer or apt, but gave that up for a while whilst I 
needed the machine for another purpose.

This was to run a Windows 7 VM - I use this with Adobe Lightroom 6 (which 
won't run on my Vista desktop) for editing my photos.  So I installed the 
latest Oracle VirtualBox and discovered that 14.04 mounts its disks in 
media/username, meaning that VB could not find the image of my VM.  I 
hacked the set up file by hand, and got the VM running.  Problem is, it 
runs like a complete drain, taking about two minutes to move between 
photos.  The VM on 10.04 was instantaneous.  No idea why this should be, 
but I got so p**sed of with it that I've ordered a new PC just for my 
photography.

So I'm back to thinking about what to do with the Linux installation.  An 
option would be to start from scratch with the latest version of LilyDev.  
My concern is how this would mount my two non-system disks: a 2TB hard 
drive and an SSD.  With 14.04, if I access my SSD from my "patchy" user, 
my mail "phil" uer can't see the drive since it seems to mount at 
media/patchy.  I'm also not sure how I would best go about GUB builds.  
Previously I had a 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 VM running on the 10.04 machine 
from a "gub" user.  Not sure whether it would be best to save the VM image 
and try to transfer it to the new build, or forget about it and start from 
scratch again.  Also not sure whether GUB will run OK just on the base 
LilyDev build, rather than in a VM?  I'm concerned that if Windows is so 
slow on a VM on 14.04, perhaps the GUB Linux will have the same problem?

Advice from anyone who knows what they're talking about even slightly 
would be welcome.