UBUNTU 8.04 BETA tried and tested, Upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04

FIRST IMPRESSIONS


Today I checked my rss aggregator and found that UBUNTU Hardy Heron 8.04 BETA has just been released. The final version will not be out until The end of April, but as I have 2 machines and don't mind loosing slight functionality in one of them I decided to test this beta version out.

Installation or rather the upgrade, took a while, actually about 5 hours (I HAD A LOT OF PROGRAMS TO UPGRADE) and some where in the middle of the upgrade the gnome panel disappeared and I lost even access to programs through keyboard short cuts. It hadn't stalled, so this was a bit of a mystery.

I knew how to solve this problem and I did once the program-installation-process was finished, a simple make folder on desktop and go through that to usr/bin and from there i activated the gnome panel once more.

A few programs had popped up that I never seen before, a few GNU step games, they were simple and their interface/theme wasn't really compatible with the rest of my desktop, it looked like something from an old enlightenment theme.

Open Invaders was crashy, but I have never really felt the inclination to play it either, so it was for the common good.

KOMPOZER was also installed, can't tell why I already ran NVU. I did notice how a like the both are or rather were to the old mozilla suite (sea monkey).

Mozilla, is lovely with only one giant exception...half of my plug-ins have stopped working. I am looking forward to new versions of my old plug-ins, since I feel a bit naked without them.
Apart from that the main entry field has a new star icon, which turns yellow if the page is in my bookmarks, plus pages in my book marks which I have seen recently are first in the field which expands out of it.

It is as everybody says, very fast.

Openoffice is a bit drab, but it is configurable, so I hope to work out how to make it look a lot better. I haven't found all of the new features yet, but I am on the case.

A search program called catfish was also installed, but I really have no clue as to what to make of it.

A lot of the programs are still running ALSA, so I am wondering what happened to PULSEAUDIO, I hope to find out what happens there, since I have had a lot of dissatisfaction with a lot of the audio modules in Linux.

Apart from that there is not much to report, UBUNTU 8.04 seems stable, but right now I don't really feel that there is too many revolutionary changes in this version, but who knows, I might spot something with real wow factor, I have after all only used it for a couple of hours.

CHEERS!!!

P.s. The HARDY HERON art work looks fab.