{"id":568,"date":"2008-04-06T17:06:34","date_gmt":"2008-04-06T16:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=568"},"modified":"2008-04-06T17:06:34","modified_gmt":"2008-04-06T16:06:34","slug":"ubuntu-hardy-heron-very-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/568-ubuntu-hardy-heron-very-cool.html","title":{"rendered":"Ubuntu Hardy Heron – very cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a spare desktop after upgrading my Vista box<\/a> – at least, I popped my old motherboard in a spare case and added a hard drive. It seemed a good opportunity to try Ubuntu Hardy Heron<\/a>. Ubuntu has a policy of  upgrading its Linux distribution every six months, in April and October, and Hardy Heron is this year’s April release. I tried a late beta, since final release is not until the end of the month. Burned a CD, stuck it in the drive, and installed it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The install went smoothly. The main hassle with Ubuntu, and most other Linux distros, is that there are a few add-ons which you can’t easily do without, but which are excluded from the main release either for legal reasons, or because they are proprietary. For example, I tried to play a DVD, but the Totem movie player<\/a> said it did not have the right GStreamer plugin. It would be nice if Ubuntu had a one-click install, something like “OK, I give in, give me libdvdcss2, give me Flash, give me Java, and I’ll take the consequences.” I fiddled around with Medibuntu<\/a>, then realised you can get something close to a one-click install if you add ubuntu-restricted-extras<\/a> to the repository. It didn’t actually take too long before I was up and running: DVDs played, YouTube worked, Java worked. I also added the NVIDIA proprietary driver which is needed to enable the Compiz Fusion 3D desktop. That one was easy: Ubuntu prompted me to do it.<\/p>\n

The “what’s new” list includes Linux kernel 2.6.24, Firefox 3 (although still in beta), and better virtualization support with KVM<\/a>. Gnome is updated to 2.22<\/a>. Think incremental rather than dramatic changes.<\/p>\n

Subjectively, Ubuntu performs better on the same hardware than Vista. There is just less waiting around. I had some fun connecting to my Vista desktop using the Terminal Server client. Then I pressed Windows-Tab to cycle between applications (note the cool reflections):<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The key factor for Ubuntu is not features, but usability. In this respect, it seems to get better every time I look.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: ubuntu<\/a>, linux<\/a>, vista<\/a>, hardy heron<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a spare desktop after upgrading my Vista box – at least, I popped my old motherboard in a spare case and added a hard drive. It seemed a good opportunity to try Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Ubuntu has a policy of  upgrading its Linux distribution every six months, in April and October, and Hardy … Continue reading Ubuntu Hardy Heron – very cool<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,49,52,62,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flash","category-java","category-linux","category-open-source","category-vista"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}