PC Tonic

Canonical has made my birthday for the second year running (today’s my 18th birthday, by the way). Last year I had received the wonderful Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) CD s via their ShipIt! service on my 17th b’day, and today I received my Hardy Heron CD! I have read a lot about Hardy since it’s beta was out and I was dying to try it out, so the CD was really a pleasant surprise (more so, as my Gutsy CD never arrived…).

Source : UbuntuOS

As mentioned earlier, I had migrated back to Windows XP for better blogging. But this CD made me forget everything and I just wanted to get Ubuntu back on my computer.Thankfully, the Hardy Heron Live CD includes the Wubi installer, with which you can install Ubuntu right within Windows (and uninstall it whenever you want). I went for it and Hardy was up and running within half an hour. A quick glance made it clear than Hardy is indeed a great improvement over Feisty (I haven’t tried Gutsy). Three hours hence, I have already explored quite a bit of the newest Ubuntu. I have plans start my own “Ubuntu for Beginners” tips in near future; till then here’s a quick “what’s-great-and-what’s-not” in Hardy Heron.

The Improvements
1.The UI has been greatly refined. Window borders are smoother, there are better inbuilt themes available (Human-Murrine especially) and desktop effects are present by default. Icons are sexier and there are better screen resolution options as well.

2.I am on Firefox 3! I have had trouble with beta products in the past, and that kept me from trying the betas of Firefox 3 in Windows. But this browser is inbuilt in Hardy and works without a glitch! Firefox 3 is easily much better than 2, which is what I still have in Windows.

3.GIMP 2.4 is awesome. I use Paint.NET in Windows, as it’s lighter and still has everything that I need. Nevertheless, GIMP has a Photoshop like royalty about it. The perspective clone feature in the latest GIMP looks cool, and I will be trying it out soon.

4.Tomboy looks promising. I haven’t quite started using it, but it feels much better than the old version in Feisty.

5.The NTFS editing feature is neat, though I will probably not need it. Looks like I will be needing it a lot…it was very helpful while creating screenshots for my article on Mozilla Prism.

6.Rhythmbox has got a more complete feeling about it. Addition of Jamendo and Magnatune stores has spiced it up.

7.Hardy recognizes and mounts my sister’s Nokia N-72, something which Feisty didn’t do.

8.Brasero is simple and un-Nero-ish, which is what I like. I use BurnAware free edition in Windows, and both have a very similar layout.

9.Geyes is great as ever. Everyone who has seen our desktop just loves those prowling eyes.

10.YouTube search integration into Totem makes my favorite movie player even better.

11.I haven’t quite got grasp over this PolicyKit thing. It’s supposedly very useful, which I should be finding out in a couple of minutes. I am comfortable with it now. Nice add to Ubuntu.

12.I had heard a lot of Gnome Do, so I downloaded it right after installing Hardy. It looks very handy at the moment, but I haven’t yet utilized it completely.

13.The Help browser has been revamped for the better. I am still pretty much a Linux n00b, so I have to fire up the Help menus every once in a while.

14.The World Clock Applet is really cool, but our town Bhubaneswar isn’t up in the list yet. I had to adjust my settings to the nearby metro Kolkata.

15.I hate to admit that I was on Gaim all the time on Feisty. Pidgin 2.4 feels so much better, smoother and simpler. Many feel it’s boring, but I will keep using it full blast in Windows and Ubuntu.

16.F-Spot is hard to beat. Picasa or FastStone of Windows don’t match up to it at all.

Things that could have been better…
Hardy is certainly a big improvement over Feisty (and probably Gutsy as well), but there are some minor tweaks that would have made Hardy even better.

1.I am not sure if there is any name of this feature in Windows. Anyway, I will try to explain :
Using the inbuilt CD writing wizard in Windows XP / Vista, you can write data to a CD-R which already contains some data. This is really helpful as I have a bunch of old project CD s containing now-useless things like a single document or a presentation (which are never larger than 100K). These CD s can’t be erased for reuse, but with the CD wizard in Windows I can easily add more data to them.
This feature wasn’t present in Feisty, and this isn’t there in Hardy either (you will asked to enter a rewritable or a blank disk if you try this). With CD s getting obsolete, it may not be really a big deal for you anyway.

2.Plugins added into Firefox can be uninstalled only via Add / Remove Programs or Synaptic Package Manager. It would have been a better choice to provide an uninstall option right within Firefox. If there is a way to do this, please tell me.

3.No exciting games are available by default in Ubuntu, yet. There are some pretty thrilling games exclusively for Linux, but they are all massive size downloads – something which my limited broadband doesn’t allow me to get.

Update:
4.Nautilus is better than ever before, but still not quite in the league of Windows Explorer or Konqueror. I would love it to shed it’s simplicity and get a bit more robust.

These small snags apart, Ubuntu Hardy Heron has won me over. You can go ahead and give it a try as well, I am sure you’ll like it.

Is there any more cool / useful feature in Hardy than I can try out? Feel free to share via a comment.