My First Week With Hardy Heron

I was going to wait for the official release of Ubuntu 8.04 but I just couldn’t wait since there were some nagging issues on my main desktop that were really annoying me. I was really hoping I could upgrade and squash them once and for all. Hardy had hit a release candidate state so I took the plunge on my Gutsy install and fired up the old update manager and told it to go for the devel-release.

The upgrade went surprisingly well, compared to the previous jump from feisty to gutsy which had forced me to fall back to the console to finish the upgrade. After everything was downloaded and installed, I rebooted was greeted by an almost identical desktop. The only immediate difference I noticed was a new tracker icon in the system tray and that the icons did a nifty zooming trick when i clicked on them (Seemed kind of fancy for Gnome).

All in all I’ve experienced no major bugs or annoyances other than since the default browser is Firefox 3 beta, I’ve lost the use of all my favorite firefox extensions. This is a setback but I can live with it, although it raises the question as to why Ubuntu is including a “Beta” browser in their latest LTS release. I am assuming they will push the final version through the update manager in June but I really see operating releases come with “beta” software pre-installed. That curiosity aside, firefox 3 is pretty agile compared to 2 and I am pleased with the much quicker start up time and smaller footprint.

I noticed the pidgin was a little nicer looking although it was frustrating to see the ability to resize the instant message text box was removed (hence the recent fork). Brasero is a nice program and has worked well the couple times i’ve used it although generally the nautilus burning function and serpentine have been adequate for my needs.

There are some issues that still plague me from the previous install which may never go away unless i do a clean install, else they just haven’t been resolved yet. One is white screen I get when using the fast user switch feature. I am aware this is an issue with compiz and I haven’t taken any time recently to research it for workarounds, but I was hoping the upgrade would just make it go away. No dice. Secondly, for some really strange reason, my avahi does not work properly on this machine, so I am unable to see my firefly daap share on another wireless system in the house (even though my laptop picks it right up). This was another shortcoming that did not get quelled in the upgrade. I’ve done hours of googling on this issue to no avail.

One a lighter note, one nagging issue that “did” get resolved was the issue with my left speaker channel not working after a reboot. I used to have to tap the gnome volume slider to make it come back but now it seems to work automatically now. Super.

Another change that I liked was when connecting to remote servers using “Connect to server…”, after defining the connection type and clicking “connect” the window popups up immediately. In gutsy, i define it, click connect, and then have to go search for the mount point icon to actually open the window… too many steps.

So there are other trials i would like to run to really put Hardy to the screws before I dare upgrade my work laptop which I use strictly for web development (and movie archiving). I still need to test the usb 2.0 functionality as on my main system, my usb drivers get loaded in the wrong order so when i plug in my flash drive, I get usb 1 speeds. Its frustrating to have to do a bunch of modprobe voodoo to get them back in order after every reboot.

I have not tested the standby/hibernation functionality on hardy yet but I do not have terribly high expectations as Gutsy was not useful in this endeavor on my vaio. Also I intend to try the latest beta of vmware server which looks very cool. Gutsy was not very cozy with previous versions of vmware when it came out do to incompatibilities with either the drivers or the installation scripts. It required some patching to get it installed nonetheless. I am hoping the new version installation will go much smoother.

At some point I desire a test drive of kde 4.1 which seems to be under heavy development. While I have been a loyal Gnome user for some time, the latest incarnation kde is seductive in its promises and warrants a test drive. Seems that only 4.0.3 is available in the apt repositories which from what i’ve read is still not production ready, so i’m not interested. I’m hoping at some point this year that 4.1 will hit the repos so I can see if its all its cracked up to be.

So in conclusion, I haven’t seen any jaw dropping improvements. Some things are nicer and a little more polished but its generally the same ubuntu we all love and know. I am pleased that the upgrade went smoothly and has not uncovered any new regressions or glitches that I’ve discovered yet. Time will tell and there are still some big updates pending before Hardy is officially “released”. I’m hoping to share more about my life with Ubuntu as time goes on.