The Hardy Heron
Posted by Ian J Cottee Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:13:00 GMT
For the last six months I’ve been using Ubuntu 7.10 (The Gutsy Gibbon) on my main laptop. My main laptop is a knackered Dell Inspiron 630m which technically is knocked into a cocked hat by my sony vaio but has the big advantage that it’s lightweight and has a battery that will still hold a charge for a couple of hours. Gutsy gave me my best working environment ever and removed my Mac lust (for the moment).
When the next release of the Hardy Heron came out I wondered whether it was wise to destroy that environment for the sake of something new. I didn’t ponder it very hard for I’m a sucker for something new and sure enough, Gutsy was wiped (I don’t like upgrades, I like to do things cleanly) and the Hardy Herson (aka Ubuntu 8.04) was installed.
It’s very very nice. Feels snappier, looks prettier (but that default brown look has to go) and has all the apps I want to use.
It uses Firefox 3 which hasn’t crashed on me so far, whilst Firefox 2 would hang regularly. Firefox 3 gave me two problems however. The google bar doesn’t work with it but as I only use it’s ability to force the google search country (useful for times like this when I’m in Japan but want all my google searches to use google.co.uk) I found a google lite toolbar which does that. Secondly the delicious plugin which I use everyday doesn’t work. Instead I signed up to Diigo. That allows me to move my delicious bookmarks over AND also keep Delicious in sync with Diigo should I ever want to go back to it. Diigo has a FF3 addin which does work.
I also have started sending all my mails for both my work and personal domains to a new gmail account. Anything I send back to you now comes from gmail. This solves my searching problems, my speed problems and my access problems. using gmail has forced me to work in a new way. Rather than just have a large inbox with the recent mails at the top I just keep everything out of the list unless it’s something I need to act on. That gives me a todo list for free (virtually all my todos come from mail). Trying to find email in gmail is just simplicity compared to fumbling around with Thunderbird’s search facilities. It also gives the problem of spam a simple solution.
Additionally, this evening, I’ve been playing around with keeping chats in gmail. Using Jabber you can hook your aim accounts through to gmail. I’ve been playing around with that this evening and so far it looks very promising. I’ll let you know how I get on with.
Ta-Da! Posting this from Firefox 3 Beta 5 on Hardy. I did the installation last night on my second desktop (my main machine has a hard-working copy of Gutsy, which will probably remain for a while). The install routine over-wrote my Debian partition and respected Windows XP in its NTFS partition, without any problems. Grub updated accordingly, totally smooth experience. As you say, it seems to boot up a few seconds quicker and some of the GNOME operations appear, if anything, snappier.
As was expected, there are few radical new features in this version and it appears that Hardy is a consolidation and refinement of the version it replaces, which is no doubt how it should be given that it’s an LTS .
This time around it seems that, relatively speaking, the server version got a lot more developer time than was the case with previous releases, with a basketload of new features, such as new security features, management tools, performance optimizations, increased levels of hardware support, improved interoperability, etc. etc. All perhaps not surprising given that it’s intended to be a viable corporate platform for at least five years and Canonical are committed to supporting it for that length of time.
All the signs are of a continuing smooth and progressive evolution, which personally I’m chuffed about.
The only thing that I’m surprised about is the decision to go with a beta version of Firefox on an LTS , not least because (as you point out) some of Firefox’s add-ons don’t yet work in version 3, including Firebug, although most of the other goodies I use, including Adblock Plus, the Web Developer Toolbar, YSlow, and SQLite Manager, are already working under version 3.
I feel obliged to highlight your comment “Gutsy gave me my best working environment ever and removed my Mac lust (for the moment)”. Coming from you, I’m assuming that’s a serious complement ;)
The Release Party at De Hams in London the other night was fun. Sorry you couldn’t make it (was there anything going on in Nagoya?). I’m totally impressed by the Ubuntu crowd. Not because they’re all technology tyrannosaurs wearing their comp-sci degrees on their sleeves, but because of their positive outlook, their inclusiveness, and the sheer sense of fun that they’re bringing to this frequently dull and cynical business. And it’s all underpinned by that non-dogmatic dedication to take Linux to the masses. It was also good to see that at least a quarter of those present were women. It’s about bloody time that computing became an attractive proposition to members of the other 51% of humanity. Yet again, the Ubuntu community is showing more established players how to do it.
Enough fanboyism, back to work for me!
Hmmm. Just thought I should update my comment above about GNOME feeling ‘snappier’ under Hardy. Having just spent some more time comparing the two, if I’m honest, Gutsy seems the slightly quicker of the two for most common operations, although a meaningful comparison is not possible because my two desktops, while theoretically comparable in terms of CPU power, memory, video and hard disk performance, are nevertheless built with different components.