Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Chronicles - A Look At Installation and First Glance

sathyabhat

New Member
Messages
33
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Source: Sathya Says

Quite a lot of people have been waiting for the latest release of Ubuntu, version 8.04 dubbed the "Hardy Heron" - primarily because it's a LTS release. So how does the Hardy Heron stack up? I decided to jump into the Hardy Heron brigade and have a look. Is it worth the upgrade?

Read on to find out more!
System Specifications
I used my beloved Dell Inspiron 1520(Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.5 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM, nVidia 8600m GT, Intel 3945 Pro/Wireless) for testing out the Hardy Heron.

I had a pretty bad time with Gutsy -no sound despite the sound card being detected, LCD brightness varying as if its possessed etc - these resulted with me removing Gutsy and going back to openSUSE 10.3.

Also, generally I've always tested the 32-bit versions of most distros. This time I decided to break the tradition and go with the 64-bit version.

Installation
One of the most difficult things for a a person new to Linux is the installation, and to simplify this, the wubi project was conceived. Wubi allows you to install Ubuntu inside Windows, as though another Windows application. Canonical has understood the usefulness of this nifty utility, and hence Wubi comes with the Hardy by default.

Since I'm pretty confident with the traditional installer, I thought I'll give wubi a shot, to check out how useful it is for a newbie.

The moment you pop in the CD, the Autorun window pops up with 3 choices - Demo and Full Installation(ie, boot into the LiveCD), Install within Windows(i.e., using Wubi) and Learn more.


Clicking on Install within Windows Brings up another dialog, where you can select which drive, size allocated, username, password etc.


Click on install and Bingo! Within 2 minutes, your Ubuntu is ready. Wubi uses grub4dos to create entries for Ubuntu bootup. I was pretty impressed with Wubi, it's really easy especially for people new to linux, and the best thing is - you don't need to burn the ISO file! Surprised? You can mount the iso using a virtual drive utility like Alcohol 120%, Daemon Tools, click on install and bam! Do note that this would work only with wubi install. Also, while wubi takes about 2 minutes to install, it doesnot install Ubuntu, rather it creates a script of sorts for automated install. This means once you boot into Ubuntu, you'll see the normal screens as you would under traditional install, BUT WITHOUT any intervention of the user.
Does wubi have any drawbacks? Well as a power user, you will be miffed at the choice - or rather, lack of, Install size options - you can choose only 4/5/6/7 GB of space allocated. You also cannot add any extra users.

Once the install is done, and you are booted into Ubuntu, where as mentioned above the actual install is done. This is pretty fast, as nothing is being read off the CD/DVD drive, unlike Live CD installs. Once this done, you'll have to reboot again(the windows effect?) before you can start using hardy.

Boot-up and First Impressions
One thing that struck me was Hardy is Very fast at bootup. Gutsy for me was slow, Feisty was ok, but Hardy IS very fast. In fact, it makes Windows XP's Bootup after fresh install(which is the fastest) seem slow! Hardy was due to get a theme overall, but it was omitted out, so you're stuck with the same dull Human/brown theme with a striking new wallpaper


While at first glance Hardy looks like Gutsy with a new wallpaper, there are various subtle changes which become obvious once you start using it. For instance, the thumbnails of pictures are now automatically displayed, and its much faster than ever. ntfs-3g support is included as usual, meaning your Windows drives can be accessed right away, and you can write to them as well.

The introduction of PolicyKit means it simplifies the need to enter the root password. Take for instance, my openSUSE partition was detected, but when I tried to mount it, an authentication screen popped up



Now the nifty thing is that the introduction of "remember password" means that next time you want to mount an internal partition you won't have to type it each time. Plus if you want only the current session to remember the authorization then just check "For this session only" checkbox, for the next session you will be asked for the password.

Hardy uses Gnome 2.22 as its Desktop manager. Gnome introduces GVFS, and this feature has been available for KDE users since quite some time now. What this means this that you can access, say files over a Windows Network just by typing
Code:
smb://ip-address
in the address bar. Very nice feature to have.






Other subtle changes include renaming of "Restricted Drivers" to Driver Manager, so that its easier to find.

Overall, Hardy seems really good. I didn't face any problems, and for me hardware detection was flawless, right from Video card, to the widescreen 1280x800, to the wireless and bluetooth, all were detected perfectly. I just might dump my default openSUSE 10.3 installation to that of Hardy, for that I'll have to test it a little bit more.
 

Spartan Erik

Retired
Messages
6,764
Reaction score
0
Points
0
I recently tried the Hardy Heron live CD. Seems slower than previous versions, but I'll definitely install it on my old machines
 

tnl2k7

Banned
Messages
3,131
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Hello,

I've been running Hardy since the release candidate and have had no problems. I don't use Windows at all any more, I do all testing for internet explorer using ies4lin, I just need to try to convince my parents to use it now!

Ubuntu is a very good OS, extremely stable. It's cool.

-Luke.
 

yosweet

New Member
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Points
0
I use hardy all the time. It's on almost every single computer in my house, apart from some laptops that come with vista on them. In those cases, I just use ubuntu on an external hard drive.
 

tnl2k7

Banned
Messages
3,131
Reaction score
0
Points
0
yosweet,

Would you say it's an improvement? I like it overall but there's a few bugs (like with the appearance panel and compiz fusion) that are doing my nut in. I must say, the boot times are better now though, and X doesn't take long to start either.

I like it =P

-Luke.
 
Top