Just finished installing Hardy Heron so here are my first impressions.
Nice looking theme
There’s a new-ish Human theme included by default called “Human Murrine” which is a big improvement over the clunky standard Human theme. Also, unlike the fugly default background for Gutsy, the Hardy background is actually worthy of being seen. Very nice job, Ubuntu team!
Transmission included by default
w00t! Transmission is included in Hardy by default. Okay, okay, it’s a small thing but you know what? (Sniffle) /me wipes nose with arm. It shows they care about me. It’s the little things.
Firefox 3
Interesting that Firefox 3 is included by default seeing as it’s still in Beta. Oh well, I’m sure it must be stable for someone to have made that decision, right? RIGHT?
Cool icons showing which processes are working.
Not really a necessity for a fellow like me who’s used to running *nix but for the first-timer stuff like showing when a Synaptic Package Manager is running can be very useful. Very good call on the part of Ubuntu.
Change BIOS option from IDE to RAID
This was my wtf? moment of the week but it makes sense when you think about it. Originally I was having trouble with Hardy on my Dell 530. The new 530s strictly use SATA connections for the hard disk(s), they don’t have any IDE connections or those fat ribbons you find in computers of yesteryear. Seems that my BIOS was set up on an IDE configuration and Hardy didn’t like that. Gutsy didn’t mind so much but it threw Hardy for a loop. The solution was to go into my BIOS and find the option where I could change it from IDE to RAID and that solved the problem.
FWIW, this should never have been a problem in the first place. I really don’t understand why the Ubuntu devs couldn’t fix this as it was reported before the final release of Hardy last Thursday.
At any rate, The new Ubuntu rules and I’m hooked (again).
8 Comments
I too finished Ubuntu Hardy..
Yep the new Human Murrine theme is much better. The Firefox integration with GTK also looks good.
ooo… pretty!!!
and yep.. that’s about all i can think of to say to that.
I agree with you Ben. The new Ubuntu is pretty good. I had a few little niggles with the upgrade, but sorted those out and I’m definitely liking it so far.
I had a few issues w/ the upgrade, too (Emerald didn’t want to work…and AWN still won’t open after a restart), but overall I’m pretty pleased with the way things are going. I’m using Ubuntu probably 50% of the time now.
Emerald works great for me. I only had to tweak one thing to get it working properly. I’ll be writing that up later today
I could get Emerald to run using a terminal command (emerald —replace &), but it wouldn’t stick. For me it took installing “Compiz Fusion icon” and selecting Emerald as the theme manager. Looking forward to your next post.
I had some bizarre problems after installing 8.04 on my AMD HP desktop. I had to disable IPV6 on both my system and Firefox. Otherwise everything was painfully slow when a network cabled was plugged in.
I also have to use the “No Graphical Effects” Desktop Option with my old ATI Radeon R7000 graphics card so I’m kinda bummed out about it. I need a new graphics card I think, But I don’t want to spend money when I already have a graphics card that works fine in XP. Oh well.
@mike: Yeah, those ATI cards can be a real pain in the butt. I assume you’ve already tried XGL.