Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Experience

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I uninstalled my old Ubuntu 8.04 Beta wubi installation and installed the final version through Wubi today on my Dell Inspiron E1705. Ubuntu seems to have detected all of my hardware correctly. The only issue I had was with the wireless configuration. I kept right clicking on the network manager icon to try to configure my wireless settings and I was banging my head regarding how to get it to work. Then I discovered the left click context menu and it started to work soon after that, with WPA2 encryption.

 

I went to nyc.speakeasy.net to test my WiFi connection. My download speed registered ~16Mbps down and ~4Mbps up. For comparison, in Windows, I can only manage 5Mbps down and 4Mbps up. I have a 20Mbps down 5Mbps up internet connection from Verizon, so this is fairly close to the theoretical maximum and I was surprised that I got anywhere near it without a wired connection.

 

Firefox runs very quickly and Pidgin is a nice compact instant messenger. I used it to talk to a classmate from high school and I really liked it. I like Natilus' type to find feature and it seems to be nicely integrated into Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox cannot play my wma files, but I am trying to read them from my Windows' My Documents folder, so that could be the cause of the problem. Since almost all of my music is ripped from CDs I have around the house, (with a few small portion having been purchased through online music stores) I believe I can work around any problems Rhythmbox might have by reripping all of the CDs and also burning the music I purchased electronically to CDs and then ripping those.

 

Installing software on Ubuntu is not difficult, provided you know about "sudo apt-get install" and the names of the software packages you want to install. I typically Google that information and find it fairly quickly. I prefer this method of installing over the Synaptic Package Manager, which seems to be somewhat cumbersome.

 

Overall, my impression of Ubuntu is favorable. If things continue to go without major hassles, I will probably use Ubuntu for web browsing (especially on my laptop), email and Java development and use Windows for gaming, Visual Studio, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Media Center. That is unless I find some way to run Windows applications inside of Ubuntu. I will look into using some software called WINE, which is supposed to be able to do that. If it works well (or at least better than cygwin did on Windows), I can see myself using Windows for Media Center and Ubuntu for everything else.

 

Has anyone else tried Ubuntu 8.04?

 

 

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