Max says…

The latest stable release of Ubuntu linux (Hardy Heron) was released this week, and having eagerly awaited its release I decided to upgrade my desktop and laptop from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04.  I’m going to keep my server on 7.10 for the time being however.

The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly.  It was just a matter of ’sudo apt-get update’, ’sudo apt-get upgrade’ and ’sudo apt-get dist-upgrade’.  After an hour or so, the installation was complete and I rebooted.

I had a few issues with both my laptop and desktop, but these were resolved fairly easily.  The Realtek sound on my laptop was supported via linux-backports-modules-generic.  This didn’t seem to be available in Hardy, and neither the old ALSA, nor the new Pulse Audio Server seemed to support my Realtek onboard audio.  A bit of searching on the Realtek website revealed linux drivers, which I promptly downloaded, unzipped and installed.  Success!

When my desktop came back up after the reboot, the keyboard seemed to have a delay of a number of seconds, and would intermittently behave as if a key had held down.  Also, Gnome didn’t come up properly, with the desktop being black.  I rebooted again and everthing seemed fine… for now.

Firefox 3.0b5 comed preinstalled with Hardy.  Unfortunately, the brilliant Firebug web developer extension isn’t compatible with this version of Firefox.  I hope that the final release of Firefox will fix this compatibility issue.  For the time being, I will have to install Firefox 2.x to allow me to use Firebug.

In summary, I’m very impressed with how easy and smoothly the upgrade went.  Aside from a few small issues everything worked fine after the upgrade, it’s just a shame about including a prerelease web browser in a LTS release of Ubuntu.  Perhaps they should have stuck with Firefox 2.x until Mozilla officially released version 3 of their excellent browser.