Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

I’ve upgraded my Ubuntu 6.10 to 8.04, because I had problems writing to a NTFS-formatted hard disk…

To be able to use Ubuntu 6.10 for 2 years without feeling the need to upgrade, that’s some achievement, right? Good job to all who have contributed to open source, Linux, and Ubuntu!

Ubuntu 8.04 is another major achievement. This time round, the installation of Ubuntu 8.04 went without a hitch. Remembering my previous attempts, this time round I didn’t have to grapple with SATA issues.

The starting up and shutting down of Ubuntu 8.04 is faster. Ubuntu 6.10’s shutdown process seems to have 2 stages, whereby I had to wait for a second pop-up of the Ubuntu logo and process bar before the PC shutdowns completely. There’s only one now.

On the desktop, the icons are looking more professional. The softwares are looking and feeling snappier, feeling better integrated. When I tried to play a DivX file, the Totem Movie Player informs me that restricted plugins are required, and proceed to install the necessary files when I agreed to proceed. Quite troublesome-free.

Ubuntu 8.04, or rather I should say Gnome’s graphics now comes with transparency support, those nice effects whereby you are able to see a faint image of the other windows below your current one. But that requires your graphics card and driver to be able to support that. Mine is a Nvidia card, and I used their Nvidia accelerated graphics driver, but that caused my PC to hang because of some icq interrupts conflict when the PC is on for some time. I haven’t resolved it yet, so I just unloaded the driver and went back to normal graphics mode.

My final verdict, I like Ubuntu 8.04. No regrets on upgrading. And I can write to the NTFS-formatted hard disk now.

Updates:

1. Gnome with chinese language seems to stall during logout.  Common pattern is when it is used with Pidgin after an extended amount of time.  You can do a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the session.  It’ll bring you back to the login page.
2. Multiple logged in users through Gnome has a weird problem.  When switching between user sessions, that is User A to User B to User A, and finally back to User B, User B will hear the “Logged In” sound being played repeatedly.  No work around for this yet…