Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Thoughts

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade to the Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Beta. I've been having problems with internet connection and I thought an upgrade might fix it, but now I'm convinced it's a problem with my LAN segment, not my card. Anyways, among the shiny new goodness:

  • Firefox 3 - Great new GTK look on all the buttons, they don't look like they're from 1993 anymore!
  • Wait, more crazy Firefox 3 goodness - apparently now I can cut and paste images around by right-clicking on them in the Blogger "Compose" mode.
  • Notebooks in Tomboy! If you're a Tomboy Notes user, you won't believe how useful this is. I currently have 78 notes in Tomboy, so being able to organize them is a huge win for me.
Tracker (left) and Tomboy (right)
  • Tracker for indexing, now with a spiffy tray icon. More importantly, when you right-click on the tray icon, you can easily pause the data indexing (for example, if you have an older PC like me and want to fire up a game that pushes your system, like Quake Wars)
  • The new screen resolution and display setup dialog. I've read lots of people evangelizing about this - it's supposed to make setting up a second display easier, such as when you're plugging in a projector. I haven't tested this personally though, and I'll believe it when I see it.

  • Lots of little improvements to Evolution as well. It handles multiple operations nicer now, and seems quite a bit snappier. Big thanks to the Evolution team for their hard work.
  • Other random things that I haven't personally tested: The new gio stuff in Nautilus is supposed to make doing multiple file copies simultaneously "better", and the old VFS mounts have been replaced with a new system. I use SSH mounts through Gnome frequently, so I'm looking forward to playing with the new system.
I'm sure there's lots of other little things I've yet to stumble across, and it'll take about a month for me to notice any little bugs that crop up. So far so good though - it looks like we've got another good Ubuntu release!