muh hardy-heron desktop

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Yesterday, I upgraded gutsy to the most awaited release from the ubuntu community — Hardy Heron  (Strong fearless bird?) And it is sweeeet! Heres my rendezvous story with Hardy so far. First you will notice Hardy boots up pretty quick, this has been brought about by implementing file prefetch and other optimisations in this release. Another prominent change is you can install on an existing filesystem without overwriting your /home! Pretty useful, don’t you think? And for the star of the show, our precious Xorg 7.3 now sports the ‘Bullet Proof X’ feature, which will go into a graphical safe mode if anything goes wrong with X.. pheww.. I have been there and not much of a command line junkie I tell ya!

So first things first – get the MadWifi drivers to work for my card, no problems there! Easier to setup compared to my experience with NdisWrapper+KDE. My kubuntu partition was detected and I instantly began copying all my files and installing software, eager to move on with the switch.

I should mention I am a little new to the GNOME environment but I love the look and feel despite what some might say about the rusted brown theme. So after configuring Compiz to suit my desires, I decided to ramp it up a little and try the tailor made for linux docks : Avant Window Manager and Kiba. In support of popular belief, AWM does take more of a simplistic approach, not much 3D stuff going on there but easier to work with and install. Whereas Kiba was all flashy with its special effects + more crash prone. *sob : why can’t I have both?*

So what do you do next? Go surfing on your brand new Mozilla Firefox 3 of course, the tides of Web 2.0 wash over you. Helping you enjoy this experience is the auto complete list that appears when letters are entered in the location bar, no longer being confined to web addresses but spreading on to into your bookmarks, history page titles and tags which make it more comprehensive. The interface though hasn’t changed much except for the Ubuntu theme that is packaged with it. Faster page loads and smaller system footprint comes to you with this bundle of joy!

The only problem I have faced up till now was with the bluetooth pairing and my camera (which IS a 3rd party driver issue really) hopefully and eventually it will go as smooth as everything else did. So thats all for now, here’s a screenshot of my desktop to back up my claims And a list enumerating additional features :

[Long Term Support (LTS) release, Linux kernel 2.6.24, Xorg 7.3, Better Tango compliance; Compiz usability improvements; Tracker integration; Brasero disk burner, Transmission BitTorrent client and Vinagre VNC client by default, World Clock Applet, Firefox 3 Beta 4, PulseAudio by default, integration of Rt2x00 wireless drivers, automatic grabbing and releasing of the mouse cursor when running on a VMware virtual machine; Wubi installer included into the disk.]

For detailed release notes : [Ubuntu 8.04 Beta]

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