Upgrade To Hardy Heron

Ubuntu 8.04 (code name "Hardy Heron") was released recently and I decided to upgrade to see if the newer version was any better. For the most part I like what I see. The biggest problem for me is not related to the OS, but to Ubuntu's decision to include a beta program as the release choice. The program is one I use daily and it has proven to be somewhat buggy. The program is Firefox 3, Beta 5.

FF3B5 seems to me (and to a few others whom I have chatted with) to have more of a memory leak than FF2 did. While I had to restart FF2 every couple of days, I find myself restarting FF3B5 several times per day. The other problem I have noticed is with TVTime. For whatever reason it wants to grab my web cam as the video source, even after I tell it to use my Hauppauge TV Tuner card. While this is a simple sudo nano/etc/tvtime/tvtime.xml fix (changing video1 to video0) it is very annoying. I have been putting up with this ever since I installed TVTime a year ago. It is a bug I wish the TVTime programmers would fix.

Ubuntu 8.04 loads pretty quickly and all the programs I have tested so far seem to work very well. It seems the only problems I have experienced have been related to Firefox. Videos from Youtube and MMAlinker.com are choppy a bigger share of the time and sometimes the browser just locks up, forcing me to kill and restart it.

When I upgraded my sandbox at work (a Dell 733 mhz, 256 RAM) it did surprisingly well...enough that I tried it at home the same day. The cleam up module of the install got rid of a lot of clutter I had built up over the past 3 years on that box (it has been upgraded many times) but did not get rid of as much at home on my main PC, (Intel 3 ghz P4 with 512 RAM) as I had hoped. It still has about a gig more stuff on it than my sandbox does and I am not really sure why. I guess I need to investigate more.

The bottom line...there is no real reason to upgrade if you are using Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) unless you want all the latest versions. Hardy Heron is the long term support version and it will be one you will want to upgrade to, but I think I would wait until FF3 is officiall released. HH has had updates every day since I upgraded to it...a sign that it is not complete...but close.