Ubuntu 8.04 First Impressions

As everyone may (or may not, but I really really hope you do) know that the latest version of Ubuntu is out. 8.04 Hardy Heron is the code name and available from Ubuntu Website and for a desktop, it's worth the download and install. But it's not without it's issues.

First, I installed 8.04 on my laptop, it's an HP dv8320ca laptop and it's a great machine. 7.10 (Gutsy) worked EXCELLENT right out of the box, just add the restricted drivers for my NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 and the Intel wireless and it "just worked". So far, that is not the case with Hardy.

Out of the box, Hardy installed the restricted driver for the video card, except there was no option for my wireless card. Wait, what? You read that correctly NO EFFING WIRELESS DRIVER! So what am I doing? I have a fucking network cable plugged in. So much for a portable computer, this could almost be considered a show-stopper.

Now one of the new features that Ubuntu has embraced is the unified audio backend of PulseAudio. That is great, except when I want to play an mp3 or an XVid/DIVX movie, it asks to install the gstreamer add-ons. Fine, so I do and I can play my music and movies and stuff. Wait, all of a sudden I no longer have audio in flash videos on the web. Possibly another show-stopper?

Not so fast, after trolling through the Ubuntu Forums, it turns out I'm not the only one experiencing these problems. It looks like the wireless was a pretty big problem, and the "fixes" for it range anywhere from using the ndiswrapper (which I don't want to do, but I may have to, event though it doesn't guarantee it will work), to installing an older version of the network manager or even installing an old version of the linux kernel. Right now I'm just going to leave it as is, and if there is no fix in the next week or so, I'll sadly roll back to 7.10 (Gutsy).

The "no sound in flash" was a quite easy fix, except I'm left wondering why Ubuntu didn't ship with it, anyway, if anyone else is having issues with no sound in flash, HERE IS THE FIX! (that worked for me)

$ sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

I did this command at the terminal, then restarted Firefox, and it worked, which makes me happy! Again, still wondering why Hardy didn't ship with this already installed.

Now on to the good parts of Hardy. First, it's super super speedy, and super clean looking. They got a new background which is actually quite good looking. It also uses Firefox 3 Beta 5 (which is the last Beta until Firefox 3 is released in June) and it is a huge improvement over and above the goodness of Beta 3 and Beta 4. A lot of the functionality is the same as 7.10 (Gutsy) but there are a lot of behind the scenes improvements.

Now I encourage EVERYONE to go and get a copy of Hardy, and install it on a desktop. Perhaps avoid the laptop install, stay with Gutsy (wait until the wireless issues are fixed). This is definitely a great version and it seems that Ubuntu is on the write track in the direction they are going and I wish them the best of luck fixing all the issues.