Nikhil Dev

This is something that people have been waiting from a long time. The next LTS version of the most popular Linux distro might soon be released in another months time. The beta is already up for download here.

Looking at what all has been talked about this new distro, this definitely pushes up the expectations. Let me just highlight some of the new features that are offered in Hardy Heron.(thats the code name for 8.04)

Brand new Xorg - People at canonical have the latest xorg 7.3 put into this baby. It allows greater customizability with minimal effort.

Linux Kernel 2.6.24 - Thats an impressive effort of upgrading the kernel. For some reason when I upgraded from 7.04 to 7.10 on my laptop, the new kernel refused to work on my laptop. Hopefully, the new kernel works this time.

Gnome 2.22 - I’ve heard great things about the new gnome. Still have’nt had a look at it. Lets see how good it is.

PulseAudio - People say this is the best thing that ever happened to Ubuntu. They have upgraded to a lot more stable audio handline software.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 - I use the new version of Firefox and it simple kicks ass. It was an obvious thing for Ubuntu to include the new Firefox.

Transmission - I have used Azureus on Ubuntu and its an absolute wastage of effort and is very ineffecient. Transmission was an obvious thing to include.

World Clock Applet - One of the most noticeable changes is the world clock applet which provides a lot more information than the previous one.

There is one huge upgrade in the 8.04 Hardy Heron. Its called Wubi. This is what the Ubuntu website has to say about it.

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

I am waiting to lay my hands on this thing. There are lot of things that the new version would be teaching to other distros.

My previous title was misleading but its just the beta which has been released. Sorry for the misguiding information

One of the main reasons that I did not install Firefox 2 on my freshly reformatted Windows Xp laptop is because I have used it for more than an year at my work on a workstation that has about 4 gigs of RAM. My experience shows that the average browser used memory of Firefox 2 is about 650 mb. Now that is a Huuuuuuuuuge number for a single application to be using up. My laptop has just about 1 gig of Ram and I would not want half of it to be eaten by the browser itself.

I then heard about these great reviews about Firefox 3 and its memory management. I gave it a try and it exceeds my expectations by a huuuuuge margin. It tends to load pates as fast as Opera does and way too faster to IE 7.

Some of the main features that I like in Firefox 3 are its ability to remember the page titles, its new crash recovery, Download manager(my favourite) and the design. On the whole I give it a 8 out of 10.

In fact Cnet recently rated it as the best browser in the industry as of now. I tried giving IE 8 a try after I got to know about it but ended up getting dependency problems of other software. If installing a BROWSER is such a pain in the ass, then I can do without the internet.

The present version of Firefox 3 is Beta 4. You can download it here.

At first I was concerned with the extension compatibility of Firefox 3, but I you have read my post on making old extensions compatible, you will be able to get most of them working just fine on Firefox 3.

Its a MUST download.