Now With Hardy Heron (aka Ubuntu 8.04)

At the risk of appearing like someone who is turning into a full-blown nerd of the computer variety, I noted something very interesting yesterday.

I was running the Update Manager function that exists in Ubuntu, and lo and behold, I was prompted to update to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) from what I installed initially, which was Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).

This pretty much means that Ubuntu 7.10 now holds the record for the shortest period of time that an operating system has resided on a computer that I own. 5 weeks.

That's not the amazing part. After a bit of thought, I was prompted to think that this could be a service that Microsoft users could benefit from - how cool would it have been if when Windows Vista was released, you ran your Windows Update in Windows XP and a message came up prompting you to upgrade to Windows Vista no questions asked?

Mind you, a great deal of Microsoft's bottom line benefits from being able to flog the latest and greatest version of Windows to users who already use it. C'est la vie.

From what I can see, Ubuntu 8.04 has fixed a few annoying issues that I had when I initially installed Ubuntu 7.10. The fonts are sharper and, I think, nearly comparable to Windows Vista. Previously, they were a bit fuzzy.

But there is one thing that is annoying me at the moment and that is the thing that certain little things that you get when you're browsing which were a pain during 7.10 are completely ridiculous in 8.04.

Quite a lot of the blogs that I read contain embedded YouTube videos. These ran badly in 7.10, now they don't run at all. Trying to find a fix through Google is not bringing up anything at all, except that I should be running Macromedia Flash Player 9. The only problem with this is that there isn't a version that exists for the 64-bit version of Ubuntu that I'm running. Nuts.

So my current goal is trying to replicate the seamless internet browsing that Windows offers, but in my Linux environment, which appears to be easier said than done. Any ideas, anyone?



Now the interesting bit is when I get my shiny new ASUS Eee PC 900 which I plan to run on eeeXubuntu. Scary!

And now, a word from...

I've been a bit quiet of late. One of the reasons for this is that I have a bit on at work.

Another is that I'm spending quite a bit of my time getting my new computer fully set up the way that I like it, which is proving to be a bit of a learning exercise.

I've chosen to run Windows Vista. Windows XP users are probably scratching their heads and asking why am I doing this? Isn't it a piece of crap?

Oh ye of short memories. Windows XP when it originally came out had some bugs, but Microsoft eventually put these right. Albeit with the assistance of a couple of hefty service packs. And now people appear to praise it for it's stability. And what about the resource usage? I think that with my new hardware, I don't have to worry about too much just yet.

I've also chosen to go for Open Office over Microsoft Office. So far, this appears to be a decent call. Although Calc has some issues with charts, so I've kept Excel on. Hopefully this will be dealt with eventually.

I finally had my suspicions confirmed about my McAfee's Security Suite: It really does vandalise the registry of the PC to the point where I had to do a clean install of Vista again just to sort the problem out. I'll come back to this shortly.

I found that there is definitely an order to follow when installing stuff - if you do it in the wrong order, you get grief. And my problems haven't been with Vista per se, just some of the idiotic stuff that my security suite was doing to the registry of this PC. Installing Spybot S&D early on has some definite advantages here - it's quite good at picking up attempted registry edits by over-zealous software.

And back to McAfee for a moment, I've decided for the time being not to install it. I'm comfortable with Windows Firewall just at the moment, and ClamWin seems to do a decent job as an anti-viral. Do I really need the other programs in a security suite? I use Yahoo Mail for my email which is quite good - sometimes too good - at filtering spam, and McAfee's anti-spyware thingy was leagues behind AdAware and Spybot S&D in fighting spyware and malware anyway.

But the big new thing this time around, is that I am dual booting this PC with a Linux variant, this one being Ubuntu. Yes, folks. I am a recently cherry-popped Linux ex-virgin, despite the fact that I shared a house with an almost fanatical KDE developer for a long time.

This should be, could be and is a bit of fun. I am having a good fun time coming to grips with the funny little intricacies of "root" (phwoar! If you're Australian, you'll find this endlessly amusing) and having to enter commands in a terminal to run some applications, as well as other funny things that Linux does that Windows does differently.

And when I run out of stuff to do here, I thought that I'd do up my old PC, because it needs a bit of work. Currently, it can take up to half an hour to boot up with the problem being at the POST stage. It does this thing where it beeps, flashes the lights on the CD/DVD drives and the floppy drive, makes a bit of noise with them and then beeps again before doing the same thing over and over. Once the BIOS kicks in and Windows loads, everything's AOK.

I think that this means that the motherboard is cactus, and I need a new one. That or a power supply. So I guess that I'm going to have to replace them. Which means that I'm not running out of things to do. Someone correct me if you think that I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Incidentally, I don't consider myself nerdly about anything other than finance.