From what you write I think I can make an assumption and that is that
you didn't make
a separate /home partition. If that is true you will have to do a back
up of that for later
restore, a simple copy from one place to another. Either jump drive or
external drive.
Now you say software you have loaded probably means loaded from Synaptic
or software
center, in that case once you have 10.10 loaded from the live disk you
will have to reload
the added applications. Now if you were to upgrade 10.04 to 10.10 they
should still be there.
Which brings in another possible glitch. Some have complained of
problems with previous
upgraded distros. I think I would rather do a clean install myself.
One thing you may want to consider is at this installation, creating a
separate partition
on the disk, and naming it home. That way you can if you want have two
version of
Ubuntu, 10.04, and 10.10 each maybe about 10 or 12 GB, and dual boot.
Depends on
how big the disk drive is. On my spare system I only have a 40 GB disk
so I keep only
10.10 on it at 10 GB and my /home is about 20 something GB with the
needed rest as
swap. You can do it with the internal partition manager, however I
prefer to set my disks
up using GPARTED, a live CD to partition my disk and format it. I have
since learned and
gained confidence enough to do it with the internal partition manager, I
think it is a version
of GPARTED too, and can do a reload with the use of the GPARTED live CD.
Either way just
take you time, you can go back on the process and make changes and the
step by step
process gives you warnings as when it can't be changed and the choices
will be made
permanent.