I did not want to install the Beta releases, and certainly not the Alpha releases because I'm really still just playing around with Linux. So I waited patiently for the official release, and I installed it as soon as was possible on April 24th (the day it was released), and am not-too-sorry to say that I was one of the many who contributed to Ubuntu's servers being so severely taxed!
I've been up and running for a week or so now, and am happy with Heron. Only one problem occurred, and it was my own fault. Some new kernels appeared at start-up, and I accidentally started up in the wrong kernel. I didn't realize that I was in the wrong kernel, and when I saw that my screen resolution was way out of wack, I (stupidly, without thought, un-fore-thinkingly), just went ahead and tried to uninstall some of my NVidia drivers and reinstall new ones. Well, this messed me up. A LOT! However....I'm back to normal with my dual-monitor display without problems...what I did was, finally, download this little tool, the IFS for Windows (found at http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html), which allowed me to navigate to my Ubuntu disk from my XP side (I'm dual booting with XP), and from XP I then saved a back-up copy (which Ubuntu had somehow been creating) of my xorg.conf file over the main xorg.conf file, thus in effect "rolling back" my display properties. Thankfully, this worked. I was about to become frustrated....
Anyway, if not for my own goof-up, Heron would have posed no problems at all, and even better, my Firefox 3 Beta 5 for Linux is allowing me to play flash videos in full screen. Another benefit, the Gnome Nautilus file browser now lets me see thumbnails of pics when I'm browsing to upload to Blogger. Like this here screenshot of my new Heron desktop (click on image for a larger view!):
You can see how uncluttered my desktop is. I love the simplicity offered by Ubuntu's clean desktop and system. I've got easy access to a few of my favourite programs whose icons you can see in the upper left: Firefox, Swiftweasel (both web browsers), F-Spot (photo managing software), and Evolution (for email). All open-source, all awesome.
1 comment:
Congrats on the new update. I have been experimenting with something in the Linux department too. Linux on a USB jump drive (flash drive, stick whatever you want to call it). Pendrive linux was cool but I think I am going to try the Hardy Heron install. With 8 and 16 GB jump drives now available at reasonable costs and most computers able to boot from USB you can carry around everything you need and not have to carry a computer! Woohoo.
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