It’s Hardly a Heron!

Ubuntu 8.04 is here. I’m sitting at my laptop typing away on a fresh install and it feels good. I’ve had two days in which to have a good dig under the bonnet and I’m impressed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all sweetness and light and I’ll tell you more about that. Do you want to know what’s in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS? Good, I’ll tell you.

Eye, eye.

The first thing that hit me was the improved resolution and refresh rate which is a significant improvement over the last version. The 3D interface, Compiz, comes integrated and partially enabled. If you want to benefit from the full features you’ll have to do some twiddling of knobs. But be warned, I found Compiz to be a little clunky when running on an Intel embedded chipset.

Digging deep.

What else does it have? There’s the usual apps you’d expect in a Linux distro: OpenOffice.org 2.4.0 (with speed improvements), the GIMP (2.4.5), F-Spot photo manager and multimedia players galore. Drop in other tools such as Pidgin, Skype and Evolution email and you’ll start to see the appeal this distribution has. Not happy with that selection? In that case you can check out the 24,865 packages currently in the repositories.
Firefox 3 Beta 5 comes installed in this release. Ok, I know it’s not a good idea to include a Beta version but you’ll be pleasantly surprised. This release is faster and more stable than the version 2. Oh, and it doesn’t eat memory anymore! There are some bugs. Some pages are slow to load and the extensions aren’t all available yet but I can live with that for a little longer.

There must be something wrong?

Yes, unfortunately. There are issues with Windows SMB shares – you can’t connect to them after an upgrade. This bug is known but not yet fixed. No doubt this will be a priority for Canonical.

There you have it. A worthy and highly capable successor. If you aren’t reliant on an MS network, go for it.

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