First Impression of the Heron 8.04

First Impression of the Heron 8.04

Well i took the dive yesterday and installed Hardy Heron.  As usual come Ubuntu release day the servers where tanked and it was going to take for ever to download so i read that a beta with a quick dist-upgrade will do the job, and off i went.

The install was pretty painless and what you've come to expect from Ubuntu's release often approach, however the dist-upgrade took three times as long as the install, but what the hay i suppose i installed two operating systems in the time it would have taken me to install windows and all the patches.  I'm quite sure if i was to do the process again, and it not being release day it would have been a lot faster.

I opted this time to reinstall everything, and rebuild my home partition.  I've been rocking firefox 3 for some time but the new Version 3 beta 5 seems nice, little issue when choosing the flash to install, and if any one has chosen the swc-dec version of flash rather than the adobe flash installer your going to have issues with a it.  Quick to fix i may add.

The overall feel, seems to be a little faster, not so hard on my laptop fan, and all in all just that little bit more smoother and polished.

I noticed pretty quickly on now when replacing a folder with a folder of the same name it now gives you the option to skip/replace/merge which i thought was a fantastic feature.

Some stuff i have noticed, intel 945gm graphics card driver for most parts fine, but it does have the same small bug in this one as the last one, but not as accute.

For some reason it has also changed the location of my wifi card from eth1 to wlan0, i've checked and it's still using the same driver for it.

There was a new package in the standard repo called prism, never heard of it before but it looked good so i installed it and fell in love with it straight away.  If you use a lot of web app's, which for half of my time i do, due to the uni network being so locked down then this is the package for you.  Mozilla call it distraction free browsing.

It allows you to integrated web app's into your menu's and desktop.  So now i have a Google-Doc's button in the my Office Section.  It doesn't load up a normal browser, but a single window that let's you move around that web app and gives the impression that it's part of your system.  They have done a few for gtalk, and that looks and feels as though it is a messenger client on your computer, and the twitter one is pretty good.  It allows you to make them your self to.  So needless to say i now have a Linux Society button that loads up a window with just the Linux Society web site, and BBC's iPlayer is now in my Sounds & Video's section.  It's sort of hard to explain because i'm sure your sitting there and saying but that's just a web short cut, and in essence your right, but it looks and feel's like a proper app, without the distraction of a fully blown web browser.

So all in all i have to say thumbs up on this one, a little less buggy than i expected, a little more smoother, and left thinking well done to the ubuntu guys for this one, i can see why this is going to be the Long Term Support version

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