A first look at Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron

Yesterday evening, I installed the spanking new Hardy Heron on my laptop. This post is not going to be a complete review, but I will just cover the major points. For more information, please refer to my twitter timeline. I just don’t have enough time on my hands for a complete review.

• No installation problems. Installs under 30 minutes for a clean install.
• The laptop is more snappy now. I run a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.73 MHz and 1 GB RAM with 1 GB swap space. The system boots up faster, responds well and shuts down much faster compared to Gutsy.
• Firefox 3 Beta is stable, no bugs or crashes until now
• I installed the server apps today. I run Apache, MySQL and PHP – this took me some time to backup and restore the databases and blogs. Nothing to do with those apps though
• The repositories seem to be heavily loaded now. So I advice to select the Best Server from the Synaptic package manager.
• Wireless works. Ethernet works(it should, ain’t it?), Compiz works, OpenOffice.org works, codecs downloaded for the various media types. Pretty much all the standard stuff work.
• Installing additional applications might take some time. For example, AWN is included in the repo but not many applets are available. So I had to add another source and install from it. I had the latest Flash version downloaded, so that was a snap to install. I prefer Amarok to Rhythmbox, so I installed it.
• On the bad side, my laptop froze twice in two days. Yes it froze! Just like windows. Mouse did not respond neither did the keyboard. Ctrl+Backspace did not work either. So it was not X problem.
• Most of the old GNOME GTK Icon themes don’t seem to work. Not sure what the problem is. My favorite Mac OSX Icon theme displays the default GNOME folder icon. This is the case with most other themes too. Has something changed in the way themes have to be created for GNOME 2.22? No idea.
• Suspend works perfectly. Hibernate works, but considering the time taken to wake up, one can shut down and restart.
• Brightness management seems to have gone bad. I am able to use the Fn key and get only two levels of brightness which forces me to add the Brightness management applet on the panel. I used to get ten levels in Gutsy.
• Movie player does not play more than 8 sec of VOB files from DVD. VLC has no issues though. The file is just 1024 MB and had no issues on Gutsy.
• Bluetooth worked after installing the Bluetooth File Sharing from Add/Remove programs. If this is required, why cant it be installed by default? I was able to send and received files to my Nokia phone but was not able to browse the phone on the computer. I was able to do this on Gutsy after installing gnome-vfs-obexftp but no luck here.
  
• Apart from these minor irritations, the release is pretty good. I would not say solid because and OS freezing a computer cannot be called solid.

The real test for this release will be on the coming weekend when I will install it on my 7 year old P III computer running at 1.1 GHz and having 256 MB RAM with no graphics capability whatsoever. Gutsy is running pretty slow. I want to see how the Heron fares. No, dont suggest me to try Xubuntu. We are talking about Ubuntu here

My conclusion is everyone can use this distribution, but some hand holding might be required for newbies. I should say that this is one of the releases that I had to spend more time on setting up the computer. This is also partly due to the fact that I have a lot of stuff to backup and restore.

Firefox 3 Beta 1

As promised earlier, here is a quick review of Firefox 3 Beta aka Minefield. I am running the Linux version on Ubuntu 7.10 on a T5300 processor at 1.73 GHz and 1 GB RAM.

    The Beta did not find a suitable upgrade to a few themes and del.icio.us toolbar. But that     is not a major cocncern now since most of the developers would be working on it. At least I     hope they are on it

At first glance, the beta version is faster than the previous version. It also consumes less         memory. And the default theme integrates well into the desktop theme. Not only the toolbars and dialogs but also the buttons and text boxes on the web pages. Below are a few statistics.

Memory consumption on launching with a single blank tab – 23.7 MB of RAM

Launching Facebook on a single tab – 8% of CPU Max and 24 MB of RAM

Gmail on single tab – 24% of CPU Max and 40.6 MB of RAM

Ten tabs loaded with an assortment of Web 1.0 and 2.0 websites – 55 MB of RAM

There is a new Places folder which contains recently starred items, recently visited pages, recently visited starred pages, most visited pages and the like. This definitely helps in visiting pages that you are interested in. What remains to be seen is how differently can this be used when compared to Bookmarks.

A new website identification system is in place too. And this sits right where the favicon of websites appear. Clicking on it says if the site is secured or not.

And one more significant change is there is an Applications tab where one can customize which type of file should be opened using what application. I have been reading that the rendering is similar to Opera’s progressive rendering. But I still see that the entire page is rendered at one go.

So far everything looks good and it should only get better as we go through various betas and the release candidate.

1. Minefield

2.  Places

3. Preferences

Firefox 3 Beta 1

Well, it does, look slick and fast. And more importantly it feels a part of the OS. If you are wondering what I was blabbering, then here you go. Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out. I have read mixed opinions so far and decided that there is nothing better than a first hand experience

I am writing this post from within the beta. I have reserved a review for the weekend. Hopefully, I should be able to do it. I must say that this would be a review on my Gusty. I am not planning for a review on Vista.

You can get Firefox 3 beta here.

My Blog Statistics

Well, I had been thinking about this for a long time. Today I had the time and the patience to do it. What was that? Consolidate the statistics of this blog.

I have prepared a rough document and put it here for all of you to see

Some cool graphs to summarize. I had taken all the data right out of my sitemeter.com account. All the graphs were created with OpenOffice.org 2.3.0

Primary Information

Total Unique Visitors: 7397
Lifetime of Blog: 15 months
Posts: 70
Comments: 74
Top Post: 1600 hits to this day : Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Installing Ubuntu 7.04

OS % Share

No prizes for guessing this one. Win XP wins hands down

Browser % Share

Well, again, no prizes here. Firefox turned out to be the most widely used browser by the readers of my blog.

Traffic Distribution

The real surprise was here. Until a few days ago, it was North America, from where most of the traffic to this site came from. Well, Europe just snatched the first place as of today

I dont pay for sitemeter, so no display resolution, Javascript and such details. Well, that would have been nice but I am satisfied with what I have got so far.

And, I have the satisfaction of completing a long due post

about:mozilla

I am not sure if others know of this already but typing about:mozilla in the address bar of firefox gave me this screen. Could not resist posting it. It reads
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 

Check it out. Click for a larger image

And today…Firefox 2.0

It looks like there is again a browser war. If it was IE7 yesterday it is Mozilla Firefox today. Firefox 2.0 was release today and I got it installed. The first apparent change is a new theme. Looks like the Go button and the Search button were designed in line with Netscape.

What is new is listed here.

The new browser was a little faster. I did not test many AJAX applications. So I do not want to comment on that aspect. The most notable features as far as I am concerned are inline spell check and session management.

You can configure Firefox to open all the tabs that you had open the last time while closing the browser. This was long due and is one of the best things to come true. Most extensions did work but my theme did not. But that is not Mozilla’s fault.

Anti – Phishing is built in and that takes care of one of the security aspects. There is no substitute to common sense when it comes to staying secure online.

There is no multi-homepage concept yet. I wish that comes in soon. With all that it has been and what is coming up, I think Firefox will get more market share in the years to come.