Upgraded to Hardy Heron

The new Ubuntu has lots of good features so I bit the bullet and upgraded from Gutsy to the Hardy beta and it went well. Gutsy was my first full-time Linux desktop in years and I was very happy with it. Gutsy did have a number of laptop related issues with my T61 Thinkpad.

• Miro always crashed with a strange Java-related issue. Miro is my off-line Google Reader equivalent for youTube and I missed it.
• Suspend didn't work.
• The Compiz shipped with Gutsy had blacklisted my on-board Intel graphics card. I could get it to work but it would crash if I played a DVD or started a graphics intensive game.
• One of my favorite Compiz plugins (Shift-switcher [Super-TAB]) would stop working after changing a couple of windows. In the end I just disabled Compiz :(

Hardy beta fixed all of those niggles :) First impressions of Hardy

• Firefox 3 is default in Hardy. I did an "apt-get firefox-2" to get the mplayer-plugin to work with BBC video streams - I just enjoy listening to Keano's qoute of the day :) Firefox-2 addons stopped working but I fixed it after regenerating extensions.rdf by deleting it from my firefox-2 profile.
• There is a strange Google Reader list items rendering issue. Using Ctrl+ worked change the font size enough to get it working.
• Eclipse (and I guess all the Java underpinnings) all work. I have had some strange problems with Java on Linux before - none so far with Hardy thankfully.
• Skype messaging works - there are known problems with voice but I haven't made a Skype call in months anyway.
• Amarok works (when you switch the output plugin to pulse audio).
• I can edit PDFs in Inkscape - nice :)

Ubuntu releases have been great when you think about the Vista debacle. I'm still using the x86 version I might just jump to x64 on April 24th.

Pretty cool. Beats the usual upgrade nightmare.