Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) – all installations (First Impression)

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Against good judgment i decided to test all possibilities of Ubuntu release 8.04. So first i downloaded Kubuntu 8.04 with KDe-4 remix as a live CD for use as wubi. Then i upgraded my gutsy gibbon on my Virtual box directly and last i downloaded and installed vanilla version of 8.04. Since the experience is less than 24 hrs old, the impressions are rather premature but what the heck; I intend a follow up post with more stuff later.

Kubuntu: This was my first experience with Kubuntu (and wubi). I ran the iso file on my XP and installed it thru wubi. So on the next boot i got Kubuntu option in the GRUB. The installation was smooth. So far so good. Then began my issues. The lower panel/desktop bar was too broad so i decided to reduce its width. When i did so, it became thin but fonts & icons did not adjust, resulting in half cut appearance. Konqueror never started. Wi-fi mangement was poor and i didn't connect. In New start menu when you click on internet, initial menu's disappear and internet menus appear. This was very irritating since the menus did not cascade. Performance was slow (as expected on wubi) on my 1 GB ram machine. Graphics were fabulous, as reputed to be. Overall, not a heart stealer.

Upgrade in virtual box: Since there is already a post in this forum about this, i'd not write too much. But i had nightmares downloading the stuff coz even on my 2mbps line i could never download faster than 320 kbps (40 kBps) which was intriguing even though my other stuff was downlaoding at 259 kBps, almost 6 times faster. But upgrade was smooth though the end result was somewhat disappointing as i'll elaborate below.

Fresh Install: i had demarcated a 20 gb partition for installing 8.04 afresh on my disk. Since this was earlier an NTFS partition, Gparted live CD refused to work at all and i dunno why. Finally went to XP and re-formatted it into FAT-32. Then when i booted thru live-CD, i just clicked on this 20 GB partition and it got mounted. Now installation won't happen on it and not effort could make it to unmount. Result: reboot.

Next i decided and auto partition guided one. A slide bar came and i, thinking what i dunno, dragged that bar to 15 GB for /. system continued installing but somehow it was installing the stuff on 2 GB swap partition where, understandably, it ran out of space and terminated the process.

Hmpphh!!, After reboot i decided to manually create partitions. I wanted to divide the partitions into 5 gb for /home, 12 gb for / and 2 gb for swap. So this time i got it right (no auto partition, no ntfs, no mounting bullshit). This went smooth and i had the system up and running.

Next thing: Opened synaptic manager which behaved very erratically. Did not show packages. Finally clicked re-load which did the trick. But strange behaviour on first time opening. Installed K3b which took 35 years to open again. Why? I dunno. Wi-fi worked good, did not drop as it used to in 7.10 and firefox showed no signs of beta-hood (though someone has said it crashes with flash)
So what do i have now? A system that has a new kernel (for which i take canonical's word), a bit torrent client (great). I have yet to test encryption and other features but i feel ‘wine' should have been bundled.

One good feature is during install it asks if you wanna import your windows docs and settings which is cool. and now all CDs come with wubi installer which is good for the faint of heart.

More will come when i test it further 😉

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