ubuntu hardy heron aka 8.04 is here

[clansman77]

distrowatch (http://distrowatch.com/)
release notes (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/804)
features (http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/804features/)
download (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu)

downloading right now
8) ;D

[Kerodo]

Managed to download it today but most of the servers seem pretty overloaded. Installed tonight and it looks very nice, as usual. Going to stick with it I think. I wasn't able to update the repo's yet or install other software, but I think as soon as things settle down in a day or two, then everything will be fine. Just too much traffic right now. But this is one nice distro, currently my #1 choice...

[Nick Rhodes]

I was only getting slow speeds, but it was done overnight and now on emule.
Always handy to have as a good live cd.

[farmerlee]

Yeh, servers seems pretty busy. I've been trying to upgrade gutsy but so far no success.

[chrome_sturmen]

holding out on this end for the build "insatiable seal"

[Beavenburt]

Did an upgrade over night, took about 3 hours. Will have a play after work.

[glentrino2duo]

downloaded in less than an hour thru australia internode mirror and installed in a few minutes, really better than gutsy! :)

[wat0114]

Ran the upgrade which took overnight. All seemed to go well except Firefox is still at 2.0.0.14. I thought it should upgrade to the 3.0 beta ?? I've no chance to check things out further until late this afternoon.

[Kerodo]

{QUOTE-> Ran the upgrade which took overnight. All seemed to go well except Firefox is still at 2.0.0.14. I thought it should upgrade to the 3.0 beta ?? I've no chance to check things out further until late this afternoon. <-QUOTE}
I did a clean install of 8.04 and got Firefox 3 beta 5 I believe...

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,
I'll be checking it soon. Too busy right now studying for LPIC-2 and writing a book ... Good news, got apache, dns, nis, and some more covered. 270 pages so far, har, har.
Mrk

[Kerodo]

So far so good here. I've seen a few bugs, or perhaps just quirks, but nothing of much substance. Seems very nice, much like 7.10, which had no issues for me. This could be my final transition to Linux for good, not sure yet. There is always the temptation to return to Win for various reasons, but this looks like the one I could stick with... we'll see..

[Riverrun]

It's very stable but there seems to be a rather large memory leak in it and it doesn't appear to be as efficient in the way that it uses CPU as Gutsy. That's judging from the very flashy System Monitor though Conky gives somewhat similar results. I've been running it since Wednesday afternoon, got the final Wednesday night and since then there have been no updates which kind of surprises me.

[Kerodo]

What makes you think there is a large memory leak?

[Riverrun]

I typically listen to Last FM or to my music collection on Exaile while I'm browsing and I might have the odd Torrent on the go as well. I never saw Gutsy exceed 45% RAM in the 5 months that I used it. Usually it operated at around 33% of RAM even while using the AWN Dock.

Hardy was using 20% more RAM for the same tasks all this morning.

Right now I'm downloading the 64 bit version of Hardy, scrobbling with Last FM and writing this in FF 3 and while memory has dropped back to 45%, it's still high compared to what I'm used to.

Incidentally, I'm not using any of the Compiz bling or the AWN dock ATM.

[Kerodo]

Ubuntu, and Linux distros in general will usually try to use up as much available ram as possible, a lot for buffers and caching, etc.. I have only 512mb here, but Ubuntu 8.04 is using over 500 of that, leaving nearly nothing. 7.10 did the same, as do most other distros on this PC. I'm not sure what usage would look like with 1 gig or more ram though. But Linux is fundamentally different from Win in that it will usually make good use of as much ram as it can for various things. That's a good thing.

[tlu]

Upgrade from Gutsy via the Alternate CD went smoothly. However, I switched back to Gutsy in the meantime since I found no solution for the problem that my two harddisks were only running with UDMA2 due to this (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/195221/) bug. Now they are again on UDMA5 and 6.:)

[Kerodo]

Yeah, after a few days of use, I ran into a few glitches and bugs, and one very annoying one that caused Ubuntu to just hang on shutdown more than a few times.. So it seems there is some work to be done on it yet.. I am back to Win for now, but if I ran Ubuntu again, I'd stick with 7.10 for a while.

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> ... but if I ran Ubuntu again, I'd stick with 7.10 for a while. <-QUOTE}

I tend to agree. 8.04 just seems a bit sluggish compared to 7.10, though the proprietary nVidia accelerated driver has helped. However, unless I encounter any serious issues, I'll stick with 8.04, anyways.

[zapjb]

Why'd they release it if t'wasn't ready? :o

[Kerodo]

{QUOTE-> Why'd they release it if t'wasn't ready? :o <-QUOTE}
I suppose they thought it was ready enough, and perhaps it is for most. Then on the other hand, they're on a 6 month April/October release schedule, so I don't think they could have delayed it much longer anyway....

[farmerlee]

Personally i've found 8.04 to run fine so far. Only thing i've had to do was iron out some small bugs with virtualbox. Other than that its been smooth sailing. I did have problems with the upgrade from gutsy so i ended up just doin a fresh install of 8.04.

[clansman77]

did a clean install of the 32bit version.everything is working perfectly and smooth.i think this is the best release for me so far..

[Beavenburt]

Well did the upgrade and my PC crashed. I really couldn't be bothered to find out the problem so did a clean install and all is working just fine. Has the usual great detection of networks, propriorty drivers, printers etc. Will keep playing.

[Longboard]

Xubuntu: going good.
out with Totem in with MPlayer: all good, updated all good.
All FF extensions ( and Ubuntu extensions) going well with FF3beta.
( even dev build of TabMixPlus stable; heh: stressed it with 60 open windows and fiddling about: nice)
No HW issues in VMware install. No interest in whizzywindows or whatever.

( Still not as good as PCLOS or Mepis though. ;D )

[Riverrun]

Mine is working really well now; it always was but System Monitor had been giving me false readings and I'm now using Htop in place of it and the CPU usage analysis it's showing is what I would expect. So Hardy is working normally.

I'm using Flock as my main browser, FF Beta 5 is consuming too many resources, it appears.

I can live with a couple of bugs. This release is far more stable than Gutsy was at the same stage.

I had big problems with Gutsy for the first five weeks what with Nautilus (crashing), FF (crashing) and Adobe Flash.

None of those problems have afflicted Hardy.

[Riverrun]

BTW, I have the final for almost a week now and so far there have been no updates, seems a bit odd to me. Ubuntu often updates 3 time a week. I was expecting a slew of patches for the new OS but nothing has come since the night of the 23rd. April.

Odd.

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> it always was but System Monitor had been giving me false readings and I'm now using Htop in place of it and the CPU usage analysis it's showing is what I would expect. So Hardy is working normally.
<-QUOTE}

Well, you gave me an idea, so I I installed Htop and it shows CPU at more like I'd expect - ~1.5%, as compared to System Monitor's ~20%. That is more like it :)

[tlu]

{QUOTE->

( Still not as good as PCLOS or Mepis though. ;D ) <-QUOTE}

Why do you like them better? (I've never tried them.)

[zapjb]

{QUOTE-> ....( Still not as good as PCLOS or Mepis though. ;D ) <-QUOTE}
:thumb:

[Longboard]

{QUOTE-> Why do you like them better? (I've never tried them.) <-QUOTE}
Just mho:
PCLOS just works the developer is a master packager with a long and distinguished history. Some roots in Mandrake but improved +++. Robust, almost automagic. :)
Never had a 'bug'.
Friendly and very direct support, Update/upgrade protocols are very well thought out and applied.
Immediately involving at a visceral level for me. Ridiculous really: just software : but cant help the involved feeling.
If you have ever owned a Subaru you might know the same sort of feeling. lol.
I only wish I had sufficient expertise to help the devs.

Mepis is a -heh- 'sort of better' Ubuntu: more DEB oriented. Also good support.

Also give Vector, Wolvix and Frugal a run: slightly more complex = Slackbased.
Fast +++ and very useable.

LOL: I've gone from experimenting with security apps ad nauseam to dunking myself in *nix

Also cant escape some gravitational pull to PC-BSD. ;D

Have fun.

[Beavenburt]

Been running this a few days now and I must say it seems a lot more stable on my system than Gutsy was.
This is also my first taste of FF beta 3. Much better than version 2 on ubuntu. Even flash is behaving at the moment.
All in all everything's running sweet. I just hope it continues.

[Nick Rhodes]

Flash is real slow for me, unusably slow.

[Longboard]

Ditched Xubuntu: not enough meat on the bones: found I was having to install a lot of "hybrid" type installs from gnomish utilities for file management, network stuff.

Not really a complaint: just an observation...

[lodore]

the problem with linux is that you have to install java manually which takes quite a few steps and i dont completely understand the commands.
otherwise its a nice distro
this distro is the first distro that finds my wireless nic card.

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> the problem with linux is that you have to install java manually which takes quite a few steps and i dont completely understand the commands.
<-QUOTE}

With Hardy Heron it's very easy. Once you go to a site that requires it, you'll be prompted to install the plug-in, then the updater finds the right version, you select it, then the downloader does the rest. With Gutsy Gibbon it was like pulling teeth, since the manual option was the only choice.

{QUOTE-> Flash is real slow for me, unusably slow. <-QUOTE}

Which version of Flash are you using? I found the non-free Adobe to work very well, better than the first one (don't remember the version) I tried.

[lodore]

{QUOTE-> With Hardy Heron it's very easy. Once you go to a site that requires it, you'll be prompted to install the plug-in, then the updater finds the right version, you select it, then the downloader does the rest. With Gutsy Gibbon it was like pulling teeth, since the manual option was the only choice.



Which version of Flash are you using? I found the non-free Adobe to work very well, better than the first one (don't remember the version) I tried. <-QUOTE}

i wasnt prompted to install java when i went to www.runescape.com and selected use sun java.
it just showed the window that is ment to load and then stops.
can you give me an example website that will prompt to install java and the updator selects right version and installs it?

somewebsites need flash and it takes me to the adobe website and asks me what version for linux i want to download and what i want to do with it?
.tar.gz
or
.rpm
or
yum
do i save the file or open it?
what do i do then?

no wonder most people use windows..
thanks in advance
lodore

[Nick Rhodes]

{QUOTE->
Which version of Flash are you using? I found the non-free Adobe to work very well, better than the first one (don't remember the version) I tried. <-QUOTE}

I tried the free flash plugins, both buggy, the non-free adobe one worked but slow.
I tried a mint livecd with firefox 2 and using the same version of the adobe plugin and same result, so I suspect the plugin is the issue.

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> i wasnt prompted to install java when i went to www.runescape.com and selected use sun java.
it just showed the window that is ment to load and then stops.
can you give me an example website that will prompt to install java and the updator selects right version and installs it?

<-QUOTE}

Are you using the Hardy Heron release, and does it have Firefox 3 beta installed? I ask because I found the java install is only easy to do if the Firefox 3 beta default release for Hardy is used. The java site that worked for me is:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml

[lodore]

{QUOTE-> Are you using the Hardy Heron release, and does it have Firefox 3 beta installed? I ask because I found the java install is only easy to do if the Firefox 3 beta default release for Hardy is used. The java site that worked for me is:

http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml <-QUOTE}
i used http://www.kubuntu.org/ and run it live.
it doesnt have firefox 3 installing but it can be installed using the package manager.
i can always install firefox 3 and then try if you think that will work.

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> i used http://www.kubuntu.org/ and run it live.
it doesnt have firefox 3 installing but it can be installed using the package manager. <-QUOTE}

I see, you are running Kubuntu, whereas I'm running Ubuntu. I don't know if that would make a difference, though it seems it might because further you mention it installs Firefox 2 by default.

{QUOTE-> i can always install firefox 3 and then try if you think that will work. <-QUOTE}

Yes, it probably will. I remember having only the manual java install option when I upgraded to Ubuntu and it still retained Firefox 2. Afterwards I wiped the slate clean (I could not for some reason get ver 3 to install overtop, even though Synaptic indicated it was there ?? ) and installed off the cd. Firefox 3 installed and then the java u[pdate was a piece of cake :)

[lodore]

{QUOTE-> I see, you are running Kubuntu, whereas I'm running Ubuntu. I don't know if that would make a difference, though it seems it might because further you mention it installs Firefox 2 by default.



Yes, it probably will. I remember having only the manual java install option when I upgraded to Ubuntu and it still retained Firefox 2. Afterwards I wiped the slate clean (I could not for some reason get ver 3 to install overtop, even though Synaptic indicated it was there ?? ) and installed off the cd. Firefox 3 installed and then the java u[pdate was a piece of cake :) <-QUOTE}
HI wat0114,
i will try that tomorrow.
to tired tonight with lots of reboots from testing some software on windows lol.

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> HI wat0114,
i will try that tomorrow.
to tired tonight with lots of reboots from testing some software on windows lol. <-QUOTE}

Hope it works out for you, lodore :)

[Kerodo]

{QUOTE->
Also cant escape some gravitational pull to PC-BSD. ;D
<-QUOTE}
I'm running PC-BSD 1.5.1 right now, it's pretty cool. Seems nice and fast, pretty simple. Download and install apps much like Win. I kinda like it too... :)

I will have to wait for some updates to Ubuntu 8.04 before I try it again. I just saw too many little issues here first time around.

[InfinityAz]

Just tried Ubuntu for the first time since v6 and I'm impressed. What no one has mentioned is the ability to install under Windows.

This allows you to try it out without partitioning your current drive (it installs it as a file and then treats the file as multiple partitions on an actual disk). This way you can update the drivers, run it as a full install vs. a live cd version, and only take a slight performance hit.

I installed it under Windows on a four-year old notebook. It automatically detected and configured my wireless and nvidia go video card. This allowed me to see if it would work properly with the existing hardware, which I could not determine from the live-cd version (since I had to reboot for the video card and wireless to work properly).

It does create a boot-loader so you can select Ubuntu or Windows at boot up. Another nice feature is you can remove it from Windows using add/remove programs and your computer is right back where you started.

[Riverrun]

{QUOTE-> I'm running PC-BSD 1.5.1 right now, it's pretty cool. Seems nice and fast, pretty simple. Download and install apps much like Win. I kinda like it too... :)

I will have to wait for some updates to Ubuntu 8.04 before I try it again. I just saw too many little issues here first time around. <-QUOTE}

Hi Kerodo,

Saw your post and I have a little query.

I'd like to try BSD. If I d/l the 'Main Installation CD, is that enough to give me the OS or do I need the second one as well?

[farmerlee]

{QUOTE-> Hi Kerodo,

Saw your post and I have a little query.

I'd like to try BSD. If I d/l the 'Main Installation CD, is that enough to give me the OS or do I need the second one as well? <-QUOTE}
The main install cd is enough to start off with. The second cd contains add on packages that can be added to the main installation. You can easily download and install these packages after the main installation.

[Riverrun]

Thanks for the reply, Farmer. I'm almost finished downloading the first CD via torrent. It's at 96 %. Been meaning to try BSD for some time now.

[Nick Rhodes]

My flash issue appears to affect swf that are complex, basic ones, like youtube and simple animations use with 5% cpu as win xp, but a game or something complex just maxes the CPU out.
Anyhow, its perfectly useable.

Who is going to keep using Ubuntu/Linux ?

[wat0114]

{QUOTE-> My flash issue appears to affect swf that are complex, basic ones, like youtube and simple animations use with 5% cpu as win xp, but a game or something complex just maxes the CPU out.
Anyhow, its perfectly useable. <-QUOTE}

Hi nickr,

could you provide a link to a site that causes problems? I'm curious to try because maybe I haven't stressed the Flash plug-in enough, yet. I did try hotwheels.com (my son's favourite ;) ) and did not see any problems briefly trying a couple of the games.

[Kerodo]

{QUOTE-> Hi Kerodo,

Saw your post and I have a little query.

I'd like to try BSD. If I d/l the 'Main Installation CD, is that enough to give me the OS or do I need the second one as well? <-QUOTE}
Sorry for the late reply... looks like Farmerlee answered though. You just need the #1 CD, all else can be downloaded and installed as he mentioned.

I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 again just now, and this time I don't see any of the prior "issues" that I had 1st time around. I think I may have borked something the 1st time when I kept trying to update the repos while their servers were overloaded, then aboring, and so on and on. So far, I don't see even one single problem now. So that's nice...

[steve161]

{QUOTE-> the problem with linux is that you have to install java manually which takes quite a few steps and i dont completely understand the commands. <-QUOTE}

If you are referring to jre 6 and the firefox plugin, they are both in synaptic. If you are not, please disregard.

[Riverrun]

{QUOTE-> My flash issue appears to affect swf that are complex, basic ones, like youtube and simple animations use with 5% cpu as win xp, but a game or something complex just maxes the CPU out.
Anyhow, its perfectly useable.

Who is going to keep using Ubuntu/Linux ? <-QUOTE}

I had CPU issues as well, it didn't max out or anything but CPU usage was unacceptably high for me. Mind you, Hardy was very stable and with the Flock Browser installed, I had none Flash problems or Browser freezing that others are reporting.

I have since gone back to Gutsy and it's much more economical. I'll try Hardy again in a couple of months when 'Special Pack 1' comes out.

[Riverrun]

{QUOTE-> Sorry for the late reply... looks like Farmerlee answered though. You just need the #1 CD, all else can be downloaded and installed as he mentioned.

I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 again just now, and this time I don't see any of the prior "issues" that I had 1st time around. I think I may have borked something the 1st time when I kept trying to update the repos while their servers were overloaded, then aboring, and so on and on. So far, I don't see even one single problem now. So that's nice... <-QUOTE}

I got it via Torrent yesterday. Haven't tried it yet, will do as soon as I get an old 'puter. Checksummed out ok. I'm really curious. It's rumoured that it's 10% -15% faster than Linux.

Thanks for the reply.