Sunday, April 20, 2008

Hardy Heron goodness

I've been using the Hardy Heron betas for several weeks now and it has been a joy to use.

I used a different strategy to previous Ubuntu upgrades. This time I did a fresh install with a fresh home directory (in a separate partition) too. I then created links to the key directories in my old home directory. In this way I was able to use Hardy, without worrying about clobbering old config files and so have been using on the machine (Dell Lattitude D410) I use for work.

Some highlights:

  • xrandr at work I dock the laptop and have a 1280x1024 screen. This is the first release where I have been able to suspend the laptop, head into work, issue a few commands and have the X session change resolution and use the external monitor. Added bonus I can get it to use the laptop as a secondary display, all using compiz fusion.
  • gnome-do I'm finding this really useful and fun to use. Love the way it spots the things you frequently launch. After using it for a few weeks most of the common things I launch can be fired up in 2-3 key pushes
  • tracker I've tried google desktop and beagle in the past, but found them hogging resources too much. Tracker seems to be indexing stuff well without hogging the cpu
  • pulse audio is the new sound server in Hardy. I don't know too much about it, but one feature I really like is you can use it to configure machines to enable network access to the server. Other machines on the network using pulse detect available servers and you can then use any available machine as the sound sink. To configure this I had to aptitude install pavucontrol and fire it up. This gives you an icon in the notification area that you can use to select the sound sink. So I can now play music on the laptop and have the sound use the decent speakers on my desktop system.
  • firefox3.0, much snappier than 2.0.