Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". The new LTS version, the first LTS for almost 2 years (the last one was 6.06 "Dapper Drake" from June 2006). What does it hold? Well, it has tons of new features, but it's not perfect.
I installed the new release on four different computers. Two computers are 64-bit, so I used the "amd64" version, and the other two used the x86 32 bit version. The computers are:
HP dv9700t laptop, Core 2 Duo T9300 (64 bit, 2.5GHz), 3GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 8600M GS
HP 734n desktop, AthlonXP 2600+ (32 bit, 2.13GHz), 1.25GB RAM, ATi Radeon X1600Pro
Custom desktop, Sempron 2600+ (64 bit, 1.85GHz), 1.5GB RAM, nVidia GeForce4 MX420
IBM ThinkPad A21p laptop, Pentium 3 (32 bit, 850MHz), 512MB RAM, ATi Rage Mobility 128 M3
First, for the HP laptop. Installation went perfectly on this PC and almost everything worked right out of the box. The Intel wireless chipset in my laptop was instantly detected by the open-source drivers and I was able to log on to my WiFi connection with just the Live CD. My Ethernet also worked fine. Sound played fine as well, but 3d wasn't enabled because the driver is restricted. After installing it to my hard drive (in dual-boot with Windows Vista Ultimate 64), the Drivers manager told me I had a new GeForce card and that it had proprietary drivers. After a few clicks, it told me to restart my PC. When it came back up, 3d acceleration was up and running and I was able to enable Compiz Fusion effects and fancy screensavers and all that good stuff. This is truly the climax of portable Linux computing.
My second success story came from my custom desktop, a salvaged Compaq case with a budget PC fitted inside. It has an AMD CPU but an nVidia graphics card. Since the Sempron supported 64 bit, I decided to use the 64 bit release on this PC as well. Installation was again simple, and I dual-booted with Windows XP Home Edition easily. The MX420 graphics card is detected as a normal nVidia card and uses the nVidia restricted driver. After restarting to apply the new driver, Compiz Fusion with all the animations ran fairly well, even on such an old card.
My third PC, my HP Pavilion 734n desktop, wasn't so lucky. I had the 8.04 beta on this PC and was hoping that the final release would bring much-needed ATi Radeon X500/X600 support...but unfortunately, it didn't. I installed the new version alongside Windows XP Home Edition and booted into it, and it prompted me to install ATi's "fglrx" drivers that have support for newer Radeon cards. However, upon rebooting, it crashed with a black screen instead of showing the Ubuntu login screen. This is the exact same thing the beta did, so I wasn't that surprised, as this is ATi's fault, not Ubuntu's. To fix this, I rebooted and selected Recovery mode from GRUB. After an xfix, I installed the new open-source "radeonhd" driver. The "radeonhd" driver is good enough to provide graphics and 2d acceleration, but 3d acceleration isn't supported yet...Oh well, save gaming for Windows I guess.
My last PC, the IBM ThinkPad A21p, came as quite a surprise to me...I had used Ubuntu 7.10 almost exclusively on this PC, even though it was installed alongside Windows XP Home Edition. Now I find myself in XP because 8.04 refuses to detect the PC's LCD resolution correctly. When I put in the CD for Ubuntu 8.04 (32 bit), I wondered why it displayed at 800x600 when the LCD's native resolution is 1600x1200. I figured it was just a LiveCD issue that would fix itself after installing (many of these sort of issues do). However, after installing, I couldn't get the screen to change. It seems to think the PC only has an 800x600 screen, and with the new xorg.conf layout of 8.04, even changing screen modes by editing the config doesn't work. I am fairly disappointed at 8.04 because of this, as the A21p is my main web-browsing PC and I prefer to browse in Linux (much safer than Windows).
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